Loch Ness meteor
John Alasdair Macdonald photographed a meteor flying over the Loch Ness The Hebridean Explorer Facebook/John Alasdair Macdonald

A Scottish tour guide has captured an image worthy of winning many photography awards, but he insists that it was just "a fluke".

John Alasdair Macdonald spends his days providing private tours of the Scottish Highlands but on 15 March, he took a picture that captured a meteor flying high above the Loch Ness.

Macdonald, who runs tour guide firm The Hebridean Explorer, told the BBC: "I was taking some new pictures to put on my Facebook page using a Sony RX100 compact camera.

"It was a beautiful, clear night and I got some nice pictures but capturing the meteor was a fluke. I will never take a picture like that again."

The image has since gone viral and such was the illumination of the meteor that the Stornoway Coastguard was inundated with flare reports and RNLI Workington, a lifeboat station, launched an operation. Thankfully they found nothing, leaving themselves convinced that the lighting of the meteor had been mistaken for a flare.