Picture a family lining up for a portrait on a stargazing night in Northumberland, with the northern lights glowing behind them. Photographer Wil Cheung pressed the shutter, and at that very instant a big shooting star streaked right over their heads. The other guests gasped, yet the family held perfectly still and missed the whole thing until they saw the picture.
Cheung says he normally spots only a couple of meteors an hour, so getting one in a neatly framed group shot was a one in a million moment. The family planned to print and frame it right away, which seems like the only sensible move.
#4 🔥 This Supercell Over East Texas Looks Like The End Is Nigh. Photo By Laura Rowe
#5 My Drive In To Work This Morning (I-90 In The Berkshire Mountains, MA)
Then there is the granddaddy of lucky snapshots. In December 1968, Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders was supposed to be photographing the lunar surface, and nothing in the mission plan covered an Earthrise. So he hollered for a roll of color film, and crewmate Jim Lovell scrambled to find one while the view slipped away. Anders still got two color frames, and one of them became Earthrise, a picture that has been called one of the most influential ever taken.
Weather can ruin a photo session, but sometimes it crashes the party in the best way. In August 2022, photographer Danika Camba was shooting what looked like a regular couples session on a mountain in British Columbia. It was really a surprise proposal from Liam Duncan to Alisa Hemming, with friends and family waiting nearby. Just as the couple embraced, a bright bolt of lightning struck in the background, and Camba later found three frames that caught it. They hurried off the mountain as the storm kept rolling.
#10 The Formation Of ‘Ice Flowers’ Is A Beautiful Natural Phenomenon In The Great Lakes Region Of North America
#12 The Japanese Have Been Producing Wood For 700 Years Without Cutting Down Trees
Some lucky shots have a lot of patience baked in. Fernando Braga lives in Rio de Janeiro with a view of Christ the Redeemer from home, and he had spent plenty of stormy days failing to catch a lightning strike on the statue. On February 10, 2023, he waited out another storm for hours and fired off hundreds of frames until one bolt landed right on the statue’s head. He called the result a dream come true, and the photo traveled around the world.
The sky loves a photobomb too. During the solar eclipse of August 21, 2017, NASA photographers caught the International Space Station crossing the face of the sun as a tiny dark silhouette, racing along at roughly five miles per second with six crew members on board. The moon and a few sunspots made it into the frame as well, which is a lot of cosmic cooperation for one picture. Seven frames were stitched together to show the whole crossing, and the result looks like a little trail of space station silhouettes.
#17 🔥 The Golden Plover Is A Bird That Hatch With The Power Of Camouflage Fully Activated. These Fluffy Birds Match The Mossy Arctic Nesting Site Perfectly
Look even farther out and things get wild. In June 2010, Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley was visiting a friend in Broken Hill and had set a video camera to record through his telescope while it was pointed at Jupiter. He caught a flash that lasted only a couple of seconds and quickly realized something had slammed into the giant planet.
