(Picture: Prasenjeet Yadav/2016 National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year)
A photographer has captured the moment a meteor burnt up over the sky in India in a stunning picture that was captured completely by accident.
Prasenjeet Yadav had set up his camera to take timelapse pictures of India’s sky island – mountain peaks that rise above the skyline in the south of the country – when he captured this instead.
The image has been entered in National Geographic’s prestigious nature photographer of the year for 2016.
The perfect shot was one of 999 he took that night and he was so surprised that at first he thought it was a fluke – only for its validity to be later confirmed by several astronomers.
Yadav said: ‘Anand Varma was visiting me and I was showing him around a mountain range in South India called the Western Ghats.
‘We camped on the side of a road and I set up my Nikon D600 and a 24-70mm lens to take 15-second exposures. I set the camera to take 999 images.
‘I slept next to the camera and it continued taking pictures until dawn. It wasn’t until the next afternoon that I reviewed my images and noticed something unusually bright and green. I showed it to Anand, and we realized that I had captured an extremely rare event.
‘After checking with a few experts, I learned that it was a green meteorite, and getting it on camera is very rare.’
Adding: ‘This is an example of being at the right place at the right time to capture something totally unexpected.
‘For those 15 seconds, I was the luckiest photographer on the planet.’
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