
If you look up to the sky on a clear, dark night, you just might be lucky enough to spot a shooting star.

That’s just what happened to one stargazer in Germany last weekend – but, it wasn’t meteors he’d originally set out to see.

Uwe Reichert set up a camera and tripod on the outskirts of Heidelberg on June 16 to document the alignment of Venus and the three-day-old moon.

In what could be the luckiest photobomb ever, the photographer captured that and much more; in a stunning image caught ‘by cosmic chance,’ the crescent moon and Venus are bathed in an eerie green glow as an object streaks across the sky, burning up in Earth’s atmosphere.

Scroll down for video

Uwe Reichert set up a camera on the outskirts of Heidelberg June 16 to document the alignment of Venus and the moon - but, he ultimately captured much more. According to Reichert, the green streak that tore through the sky on Saturday was unlike anything he’d seen before. Researchers identified the ground track, revealing it was 140 miles away over Belgium at the time

The European Space Agency shared Reichert’s incredible photo early this morning, writing: ‘Sometimes, nature is the best art director!’

Reichert, the editor-in-chief at Sterne un Weltraum, used a 100-400mm telephoto lens to photograph the night sky, with the lens set to 180mm.

After adjusting the aperture and sensitivity, he pressed the button to snap an image of Venus shining brightly beside the moon.

And at that moment, something remarkable appeared.

‘By cosmic chance, in the same instant that he pressed the button of the camera's remote control, Reichert saw something bright falling from the sky,’ ESA says.

‘First, a white light flashed up above Venus, moved downward with high speed, changing colour into an intense greenish glare, and what once appeared as one object disintegrated to a spray of smaller sparkles keeping the original trajectory until dying out just over the horizon.’

According to Reichert, the green streak that tore through the sky on Saturday night was unlike anything he’d seen before, despite being a long-time observer.

‘The sparkles looked more like an exploding firework than a dying shooting star,’ ESA said.

But, given the speed of the object and the angle of its ‘sparkles,’ the experts say there was no way it could be attributed to fireworks or other pyrotechnics.

Venus reached its highest sunset altitude this month, according to NASA. This caused the planet to shine brightly in the night sky. Jupiter is also set to make an appearance, when it will show up beside the moon on June 23

WHY DO WE HEAR STRANGE NOISES WHEN A METEOR PASSES? Sky-watchers over the years have reported hearing strange popping, hissing, and rustling sounds almost instantly when a meteor passes overhead. While it may not seem unusual that a flying fireball would generate noise, these objects are roughly 60 miles away when they can be seen from the ground, and the sound should take several minutes to travel. Now, researchers have discovered that the bright pulses of light can create audible sounds far away from the source by heating ‘dielectric’ materials – including clothing, leaves, and even frizzy hair. The sounds, they explain, must be the result of electromagnetic energy from the meteor that has travelled to the viewer miles away, and been converted to acoustic waves. Materials known as 'dielectric transducers' are all around us and could facilitate the phenomenon. This includes dark paint, fine hair, leaves, grass, and dark clothing. Bright pulses of light from the meteor heat these materials, which subsequently conduct heat into the air around. This creates pressure waves, which can then manifest as photoacoustic sound. Advertisement

While the fireball appears to be close by, the space agency says it was actually over 140 miles away.

‘The streak appeared to have pierced the clouds as an object would have done when falling from high altitude down to Earth,’ ESA said of the phenomenon.

‘Clearly, this object had really been falling down, but taking perspective into account the whole trajectory must have been above the clouds.

‘Therefore, the flight path must have been much farther away than it appeared.’

Researchers later identified the ground track after hundreds of people reported seeing it from Holland and Belgium – where it had been passing overhead when Reichert spotted it.