Photographer Gets Once-In-A-Lifetime Shot Of Meteor By Accident

The impossible caught on camera, accidentally.

Prasenjeet Yadav never planned to be a photographer, let alone capture something which almost no one ever can - a meteor. Even with over 25 million meteors flying towards Earth every day, they're often too small or too hard to see during the day and most people sleep during the night that means they don’t have a chance to see them maybe ever, let alone photograph them. However, that is exactly what Yadav was able to do, completely unintentionally.

Born in Nagpur, India, hardly 35 miles from the setting for Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, Yadav was no stranger to tigers and lions simply wandering through his backyard. These big cats fascinated him as he grew up; he studied them as a molecular biologist. Despite his keen interest, he still had the sense that most people didn't even read, leave alone understand, academic papers. To help people understand better, he realized people needed to see science in the real world, which is when he decided to become a photographer.

The moment he accidently captured the bright green meteor, Yadav was filming something entirely different. He had won a National Geographic Young Explorers grant to document "sky islands, "which is the isolated mountain peaks that rise above the clouds along a 400-mile swath of the Western Ghats. He wanted to film Mettupalayam in an effort to show the area's urbanization compared to how it was in recent decades. To best show this, he decided to use the active nightlife in the area.

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