On June 4, 2023, at 6:28 in the morning, Brazilian photographer Leonardo Sens finally got the picture he had been chasing since 2021. The Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, cradling the full moon in its outstretched hands.
The idea sounds simple. The execution was anything but.
To make the statue appear to hold the moon, Sens had to shoot from Icaraí Beach in Niterói, about seven miles from the Corcovado mountain where the statue stands. At that distance, the moon looks enormous next to the figure, but only if the moon, the statue, and the camera line up perfectly.
They almost never do. In 2021, haze ruined his framing. In 2022, clouds rolled in, and he never took a single shot.
Sens is no newcomer to patience. He has been a photographer since 2005 and regularly documents the nature and landscapes of Rio de Janeiro.
Even the day before his success, on June 3, he set up again and watched cloudy weather wreck the conditions one more time.
Then came that Sunday morning. The sky cleared, the full moon drifted toward the statue's open arms, and Sens fired away with his Nikon D810, taking around 400 photos at different angles and moments as the alignment held.
One of them was the frame he had spent three years waiting for, the 98-foot concrete statue appearing to gently hold the moon against a glowing sky. The photo went viral worldwide, shared across news outlets and social media.
The statue he finally caught holding the moon has an arm span of 92 feet.