It is really hard to photograph a meteor. Even though some 25 million of them dash to Earth each day, most of them are too minor to track. Those you can see are threatening to spot throughout the day, and most people are asleep when they streak across the sky at night. But Prasenjeet Yadav achieved to get one anyway, completely by accident.

He didn’t set out to be a photographer. He was born in Nagpur, roughly 35 miles from the location for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and tigers and leopards regularly strolled through his yard. He studied big cats as a molecular environmentalist, but had the intelligence that most people didn’t read, let alone understand, moot papers. If people are to comprehend science, he supposed, they have to see it. And so he converted a photographer.

Yadav won a National Geographic Young Travelers grant to document “sky islands,” the isolated mountain peaks that rise above the vapors along a 400-mile swath of the Western Ghats. He wanted a nighttime shot of Metaplay to show the area’s development. In the wee hours of October 9, 2015, Yadav drove into the crags, set up his Nikon D600, and automatic it to take 15 second contacts every 10 seconds until 4:30 am.

The next day, he studied the thousand or so images on his camera and dotted a vivid flash of emerald light. At first, he thought it was a fluke, but several stargazers confirmed that it was a meteor. It’s a perfect shot. “I was there, and that’s what taking pictures is all about—being there in the correct place at the right time,” Yadav says. That, and a bit of luck.