On the night of May 27, 2021, Indonesian photographer Gunarto Song was taking a few last frames of Mount Merapi before packing up when a ball of light dropped out of the sky. His shutter was open for four seconds. In the picture that came back, a green streak runs straight down into the mouth of the most active volcano in Indonesia.
Quick facts
- Photographer: Gunarto Song
- When: The night of May 27, 2021
- Volcano: Mount Merapi, Java, Indonesia, erupting regularly since 1548
- Exposure: Four seconds
- The green: Magnesium in the meteor, according to Indonesia’s space agency
What he saw
Song was set up at Batu Alien, a boulder the volcano threw out during an earlier eruption that now serves as a lookout. He was watching the clouds near the summit. Then came the light. He described it as round, bright white, and gone within a second or two. He heard nothing.
Two days later he posted three frames to Instagram with a question for a caption. Had a meteor just fallen on the peak of Merapi? The pictures, he said, were unedited.
Did it actually hit the volcano?
Almost certainly not. Meteors burn up something like fifty to seventy miles overhead. Merapi’s summit stands under two miles high. What the camera caught is alignment. The streak was far above the mountain and probably well beyond it, and from that one rock on that one hillside the two lined up.
Nobody doubts that something was there, though. CCTV cameras trained on the volcano recorded the flash at the same moment. Indonesia’s space agency, LAPAN, concluded it was a meteor and pointed out that two showers were active that week, the Eta Aquariids and the Arietids.
Why it’s green
To Song’s eye the light was white. The camera recorded green. LAPAN put the color down to magnesium burning off as the rock tore through the atmosphere. A meteor’s color comes from what it’s made of.
The line is the shutter’s doing. A falling point of light, held for four seconds, becomes a stroke. (If you’ve ever mixed up your space rocks, this animation sorts out meteors, meteoroids, asteroids and comets.)
It has happened before
In 2016, photographer Daniel Kordan was camped beside a pond on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, shooting Klyuchevskaya, the tallest active volcano in Eurasia, with a group of students. During a 25 second exposure a shooting star crossed the frame above the lava. He called it an accident too. Both the meteor and the eruption show up again in the pond.
The volcano underneath
Merapi means, roughly, Mountain of Fire, and it has earned the name. It has erupted regularly since 1548. An eruption in 2010 killed more than 350 people. The glowing lava in the picture below is Song’s as well, taken on another night.
Since then: Merapi hasn’t calmed down. It has been held at the second highest alert level since November 2020, and it was still there this summer, sending lava avalanches down its slopes.
We’ve looked at this picture a lot of times. Knowing it’s a trick of alignment makes us like it more. The meteor was always going to fall. Somebody had to be standing on exactly that rock!
Images © Gunarto Song. Follow his work on Instagram. For more volcanic drama, see Gabor Nagy’s photographs of lava, and for another split second nobody planned, the bobcat that caught a heron in midair.
