Every day 25 million meteors enter the Earth’s atmosphere, however most of them are far too small to ever be noticed, though we might sometimes see a slightly larger one as a ‘shooting star’ on a clear night. However back in 2015 an Indian photographer caught this amazing sight on camera.
Prasenjeet Yadav, an Indian photographer who had already won a Young Explorers grant from National Geographic, captured the image after setting up his camera in the mountains over the city of Mettupalayam in South-Central India.
Prasenjeet was not even awake when the photograph was taken as he had set up his equipment to automatically film through the night. His original intention was to capture the sunrise and sunset and the play of light upon the city below, he had no idea what he was in for. Low and behold the image of a huge meteor leaving a bright green light showed up on film the next day. Prasenjeet was stunned!
While it is possible to sometimes capture shooting stars, larger meteorites are near impossible to capture on camera or on film simply because they are much more rare and we have absolutely no idea beforehand where they are likely to land.
Former molecular ecologist turned professional cameraman Prasenjeet 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.”
He went on to add:
“After checking with a few experts, I learned that it was a green meteorite, and getting it on camera is very rare. 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.”
The reason the greenish hue is emitted by the meteor is a combination of heated oxygen burning around the meteor as a result of the sheer speed and friction caused by the entry and whatever minerals were contained in the meteor being released during the burning process. The photograph later went on be shortlisted for the 2016 National Geographic photo of the year.
The image goes to show us not only the beauty of Earth but the power and mystical quality of the Universe.
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