Months before a family vacation in Paris, photographer Stefano Zanarello had started preparing his extraordinary photo using the PhotoPills app.

Visiting the City of Light from Italy, he had realized that there would be a full moon on the first night of his trip there so he began looking for a landmark in the French capital to align the moon with.

“I rejected the Eiffel Tower, whose height would have forced me to shoot too far from the center and late at night, so I decided to check out the Arc de Triomphe,” he said, speaking to PetaPixel.

“I was surprised to see that the full moon would be right inside the Arc de Triomphe.

The chances of a photo shoot like this are very slim and to find out that everything was coincidentally perfect on the day I was going to be in Paris was incredible, a great blessing,” he continued.

Just as the full moon was inside the Arch on April 7, Zanarello was forced to create a composite photo due to the different exposure times for the Moon and the street scene in front of the famous monument.

He was about 1,300 meters from the Arch and was using a Canon 10-400mm with a focal length of 520mm, which he achieved using a 1.4x teleconverter.

“Obviously I’m very happy, but also relieved,” he confessed. “In such a photo, the useful period, with the Moon in the right position, lasts only a few seconds because with the magnification provided by the very long focal length the Moon moves quickly across the sky.

So before this shoot, I was nervous and nervous because I knew if something went wrong there would be no second chance.” He was lucky that it wasn’t overcast that night and was able to capture the spectacular photo that NASA announced as the photo of the day.

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