Time-lapse video ends with a big surprise.

Japanese Twitter user @umaibouM1956’s hobbies include motorcycle riding and camping, and often he’ll combine the two by packing his tent and other supplies, hopping on his R1200GSA, and heading into the mountains to spend the night. Along the way, he sometimes snaps some great photos of the local scenery, like these shots he took in Hakone, Kanagawa Prefecture, which is particularly pretty in the fall.

But on a recent overnight excursion, @umaibouM1956 decided he wanted something even more dynamic. Having found a spot to park his bike so Mt. Fuji would be in the background, he set his GoPro down near its back wheel and started the time-lapse mode so he could record the stars’ dance across the night sky and the sun rising from behind Japan’s tallest mountain once morning came.

It’s an artistically cool concept, and right off the bat, the late-night images are sharp and clear, capturing the rising of the moon and the dramatic swirling of misty clouds around Fuji’s slopes. However, this bright idea turned out to be a little too bright, because when dawn breaks, it looks like the world itself is being destroyed.

So what happened? Well since @umaibouM1956 was going to be recording all night long in the middle of the mountains, with little to no ambient lighting around, he set his camera to low-light mode. That was a good decision in the pre-dawn hours, but once the sun peeked up over the horizon, the sudden rush of amplified light made it look the entire planet was being wiped out in a very flashy way.

“Was trying to capture the sunrise on my GoPro, but I screwed up the settings and the sun brought the end of the world with it,” tweeted @umaibouM1956 with the video, prompting reactions such as:

“Armageddon.”
“Is Sarah Conner somewhere in that video?”
“Did the moon crash into the earth?”
“Looks like the colony drop from Gundam.”
“I think I saw this in Fallout 76.”
“It’s the beginning of Fist of the North Star.”

One commenter even had a video theory of their own.

▼ “Sorry! I think the end of the world was caused by this Wave Motion Gun blast from the Space Battleship Yamato.”

There was also one less apocalyptic interpretation of @umaibouM1956’s video, from a commenter who said:

“When everything gets enveloped in white light at the end, I thought you were being taken to an alternate world. There seem to be a lot of stories like that these days…”

Thankfully, though, it was all just a camera quirk, and @umaibouM1956, as well as the rest of the planet, is still here.

Source, images: Twitter/@umaibouM1956
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