Astrophotographer Brendan Larsen spent two hours in September photographing the night sky above Mount Taranaki on New Zealand’s North Island, capturing both the mountain and the stars. During the 120 minutes he made hundreds of exposures: Larsen set his camera to take an unlimited number of eight-second exposures with two-second gaps between frames. “I left the camera running for two hours, so 578 photos were taken. That was the easy part of the process,” he told The Guardian.
The more time-consuming stage came after the shoot. Larsen says he spent roughly 40 hours in Photoshop stacking and compositing the individual frames. Each raw exposure contained about 25 satellite tracks, and a large portion of the editing time was spent carefully removing stars so the satellite trails would stand out clearly.
The completed image shows about 1,400 satellites and roughly 14,000 trails intersecting above the mountain, forming a dense network in the sky. After Larsen posted the photograph on social media it quickly went viral: it gained him approximately 15,000 new followers, received tens of millions of views and drew several thousand comments.
Among the responses were claims that the image had been generated by artificial intelligence. Larsen acknowledges that image-generating software has become sophisticated enough that, for viewers unfamiliar with the location or astrophotography techniques, it can be hard to tell AI-created images from real photographs. He finds such accusations frustrating, and is particularly annoyed when others download his picture, alter it with AI tools and re-upload it—often introducing obvious errors, he says.
Anticipating questions about authenticity, Larsen documented his workflow on video, showing both the capture process and the post-processing steps; he hopes this helps viewers connect emotionally with the scene and understand how the image was made.
The episode also highlights a wider issue: there are currently about 16,000 satellites orbiting Earth, and experts have long warned that the growing number of satellites can hinder scientific observations and make life harder for researchers and astrophotographers.
Why it matters
Larsen’s image illustrates how satellite traffic is increasingly visible in night-sky photography and how careful, manual post-processing can be mistaken for synthetic imagery in an era when AI-generated visuals are common. It underscores tensions between new technologies and public perceptions of authenticity in photographic work.
