AstroAlert: See the world’s oldest trees by starlight

It now appears that the photos may be fake, or at least heavily composited. Sharp-eyed readers have pointed out a number of suspicious features in the photos. For example, the image at the top shows that the region in the box (containing the Pipe Nebula) appears to have been cloned in several locations.

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Likewise, Moon’s image below shows an impossible arrangement of the Milky Way and the Small Magellanic Cloud (a tiny neighbor of our own galaxy). The top photo is the one published by Moon, with the Small Magellanic Cloud visible just to the right of the tree and the Milky Way in the upper left. The bottom photo shows where the Milky Way would actually appear in the sky for the orientation of the Small Magellanic Cloud shown.

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If you’d like more evidence, the PetaPixel website has a pretty thorough analysis.

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My apologies to AstroAlert readers for sharing these bogus images with you. It’s not uncommon for photographers to take some liberties, such as blending long exposures of the night sky with shorter, more illuminated exposures of foreground objects to increase the dynamic range of the final photo. Moon, like any artist, has a right to take creative license. But in this case, it appears that the photographer’s stunning images are the product of some clumsily executed Photoshop sleight of hand.

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Many thanks to AstroAlert reader Richard Payne for alerting me to this development.

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If you’re a glutton for punishment or enjoy movies that are so bad they’re good, be sure to check out the Fake Astropix twitter account (@FakeAstropix) for an endless stream of the worst of the worst fake astrophotography culled gleefully from the interwebs

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Best regards,

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Michael