If you ask any photographer, they will likely tell you that capturing a photo like this would be considered a “once-in-a-lifetime” shot.
Prasenjeet Yadav, a photographer based in Bangalore, India, set out to capture some time lapse images to “document the urbanization” of what is called the “sky islands” of southern India on an October night in 2015.
He set his camera up in the perfect spot to take 15-second exposure photos every ten seconds for around 1,000 shots. Then, he set up a tent and slept for a few hours. When he woke up and looked at the images his camera captured, he couldn’t believe it.
Yadav ended up taking a photo of a magnificent emerald-colored meteor. At first, he wasn’t sure what it was, but astronomers confirmed it was a meteor.
He was originally there because he won a National Geographic Young Explorers grant to document the “sky islands,” but ended up getting so much more.
“I was there, and that’s what photography is all about—being there in the right place at the right time,” Yadav said, according to WIRED.
According to an Instagram post of Yadav’s page, National Geographic published the photo in 2016. Since then, he’s had many more images published!
https://www.instagram.com/p/B5IUVdSArCH/
In his Instagram post, Yadav wrote that “greenish color come from a combination of the heating of oxygen around the meteor and the mix of minerals ignited as the rock enters Earth’s atmosphere.”
Check out the stunning photo of the Green Meteor below.