Emerald green meteor photographed over India’s ‘Sky Islands’

Photographing heavenly natural phenomenon involves a lot of preparation and an even greater amount of luck. Image: Prasenjeet Yadav

If getting the right timing to photograph a meteor is already a challenge, all the more is photographing a brilliant green meteor streaking across the sky.

Such a chance encounter came upon photographer Prasenjeet Yadav one evening in the small town of Mettupalayam in the mountainous Western Ghats region of southern India, reports Wired.

Yadav’s photo was purely accidental, as he has previously set up a time-lapse rig in a nearby hilltop. And as was most of the people in town were, he himself was asleep when the meteor made its way through the sky.

When he reviewed the thousands of images that his rig captured the next morning, he found the brilliant flash of emerald green light. Yadav first thought it was just a fluke, but several astronomers confirmed for him that it was indeed a falling meteor.

Yadav’s reason for setting up the time lapse rig was because he wanted a nighttime shot of Mettupalayam, to illustrate the urbanization of the area. Yadav had won a National Geographic Young Explorers grant to document “sky islands.” These were the isolated mountain peaks that rose above the clouds in a 400-mile swath of the Western Ghats, hence the term.

His time-lapse rig was set up with a Nikon D600 that was programmed to take 15-second exposures every 10 seconds until 4:30 a.m. After setting it up, he let the camera do its work, and went back to it in time. Little did he know that his presence on site, through his trusty set-up camera, would yield a pleasant surprise.

“I was there, and that’s what photography is all about—being there in the right place at the right time,” says Yadav. Alfred Bayle