HOW TO SPOT A FAKE SPACE PHOTO
Reveal if that sensational image is real or a fraud with All About Space’s top tips
If you use any social media platforms you will know they are dominated by two types of images: pictures of cute cats, and photographs of anything to do with space. Every platform has thousands of members who enthusiastically share photographs taken through the International Space Station’s windows, by space probes on or orbiting planets and through telescopes. Many are jaw-droppingly beautiful, and during the past difficult year every time a photo of the northern lights blazing above snow-capped Canadian mountains or a view of a copper-hued eclipsed Moon hanging above a city skyline has popped up on our timelines, it’s not just been a pleasant surprise, but a welcome distraction from our everyday troubles. If there was a cat in it too, even better…
Unfortunately, many of the beautiful astronomical images posted on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram are not what they claim to be.
Some are genuine, but stolen from other people. Others are composites, impressive but totally fake combinations of several different genuine photos to make something inaccurate or scientifically impossible. Others still are purely digital creations, produced inside computers with not a camera in sight. Why do people create, or knowingly share, these fake images? What do they get out of it?
It has to be said that some do it simply to fool people, to deliberately cause trouble and wind people up. They post their fake images then sit back and wait for the angry responses to come in from people who have spotted their fakery, and they get a good laugh out of it. Others are attention seekers who want to be popular on social media; they want as many likes or shares as possible. A few do it because they don’t have the equipment, experience or skill needed to create genuine images, or they do but they are too lazy to learn how to take them themselves, so they create fake images or steal other people’s and claim them as their own, usually after ‘tweaking’ them in some way in the hope people won’t notice.
Others are looking for financial reward: the media loves jaw-dropping images of eclipses, a bright shooting star or a display of the northern lights, and sometimes will pay for them. Unfortunately, many of the people who select images for use in newspapers and for their websites have very little – if any – astronomical knowledge, so they don’t know which images are real and which are fake. Some of them probably don’t care – as long as an image is colourful and dramatic they’ll use it, hoping to attract more readers. Before we look at how to spot these fakes and prevent yourself from being fooled – and maybe even unwittingly spreading them more widely across the internet – let’s take a look to see how this all started.
It used to be all but impossible to fake a ‘space’ image, especially astrophotographs of objects in the night sky. Decades ago, cameras held coiledup strips of light-sensitive film, which had to be processed in tanks of chemicals to produce prints, or slides. Those images were essentially ‘one-offs’, printed in books and magazines and on posters, and couldn’t be copied. Today sky-watchers are armed with digital cameras that would have been considered sorcery back in those days, routinely firing off dozens or even thousands of images in one night without the old worries about running out of film. The next morning we process and stack our images on our computers, then post them online for others to enjoy – where anyone can steal them with a click of a mouse or a tap of a finger and then either claim them as their own or use them to make another image.
Today there are so many stolen or faked images out there you’d be forgiven for thinking that spotting one is like looking for a needle in a field of haystacks. In fact, once you know what to look for, it’s quite easy to tell if an astroimage is fake or not.
First of all, you don’t have to be a detective to think that it’s a bit odd when someone posts a stunning wide-field image of the night sky without any previous references to taking such photos. Every expert astrophotographer working today took terrible photos when they started out, and the quality of their work gradually improved as they built up their skills.
If someone who has never posted even a simple constellation portrait before suddenly posts an amazingly detailed image of a galaxy or nebula, claiming it as their own, you could be forgiven for raising an eyebrow and wondering if they’re passing off someone else’s work as their own – and they often are. This kind of image theft happens a lot, but even though the offenders are quickly
“Many of the beautiful Astroimages are not what they claim to be”
found out and named and shamed, it doesn’t stop others doing it again and again.
Some images can be identified as fakes because they are astronomically inaccurate or simply impossible. It’s so easy to Photoshop streaks of light onto a night sky image that after every meteor shower social media is flooded with photos claiming to show a sky full of brilliant shooting stars, except they are falling parallel to each other instead of radiating from a common point as they actually do. We’ve also lost count of the number of ‘stunning images’ people have shared showing the Milky Way blazing above a castle or beach somewhere at completely the wrong orientation to the horizon for that time of year, or looking ten times brighter and more detailed than it can ever appear in real life. Fakers who snip the Milky Way out of one image and blend it into another assume no one will know, but amateur astronomers can spot a fake image like that from light years away. However, people with no knowledge of the workings of the sky likely wouldn’t spot anything suspicious, and they then share the images, genuinely believing they’re real because they want to believe something so beautiful is real.
There are peak periods of fakery too. After every total lunar eclipse Twitter and Facebook groan under the weight of faked images showing the pumpkin-hued Moon glowing in a constellation it wasn’t in – a sign that the ‘photographer’ actually made it by cutting an eclipsed Moon out of someone else’s photo and then used image
“Some images can be identified as fakes because they are astronomically inaccurate or simply impossible”
processing software to superimpose it onto another photo of a different star field altogether, usually a constellation nowhere near the ecliptic, the path the Moon follows across the sky.
Such ‘composite’ images are the most common type of fake. They require the least skill to make, but they are the most easily spotted. Giveaways of composites include being able to magically see stars through the Moon, spotting that the Moon’s reflection in a lake or on the ocean doesn’t line up with the actual Moon in the sky or seeing the Moon shining in front of clouds. Again all impossible things even a beginner to astronomy can tell are just wrong.
It’s easy to spot another genre of fake astrophotos because they are simply ridiculous. One hugely popular image, shared after every solar eclipse, claims to have been taken from the International Space Station, showing an enormous eclipsed Sun shining above Earth with the Milky
Way painted across the sky behind it. Another offender shows an eclipsed Sun with a blood-red corona surrounding it and an aeroplane flying in front of it, somehow fully illuminated.
Another problem non-astronomers have is knowing if the features and colours they see on a photo are accurate. Just like wedding and wildlife photographers, astrophotographers often ‘tweak’ their images a bit to add contrast and make details clearer, but some take it too far. This is particularly true for photos of the northern lights, which are often enhanced and saturated so aggressively that the subtle, natural pinks and greens of a display become splashes of bright crimson and neon green, giving a very false impression of what the displays actually look like.
After studying our parade of fake photos, you’ll be able to spot the next that appears on social media and elsewhere – and avoid sharing these classics with the rest of the world.