There is no way that this is a real photo. You need several minutes of exposure time for that galaxy. Either the stars are sharp but the landscape gets motion blur, or the landscape is sharp but all the stars appear as line streaks.
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
That counts as "not a real photo" in my book. Also, the photo of the landscape and of the sky would have to be taken from different locations because otherwise, you wouldn't be able to get a crisp transition from the starry sky to the stationary objects on the scene.
I’m pretty sure there are techniques for avoiding that issue, also Andromeda is very bright and this photo could have used an exposure time less than 30 seconds to avoid star trailing.
Andromeda covers about 50 mrad angle on the sky; at 30 s exposure time, you'd expect star trails of 2 mrad (1/25th of the size of Andromeda), which should be (just) visible at this resolution.
And what other "techniques" are not of the "use photoshop" kind?
So I'm assuming it's a composition, with one night shot of the mountain, and then a stacked set of sky images composited in Photoshop. That's perfectly legit as long as you explain the process and make it clear, but these unattributed photos don't give context.
A commenter in the reddit topic on how to do this: '... you need to "fake" the proportions, to make the background smaller or the foreground bigger to hide the smear of the mountain in the rotated long exposure.'
I rest my case, but good to know that it wasn't an AI fake. 🙂
@ssamn.bsky.social
Oh and @astronomers.bsky.social : the photographer wrote:
"Please credit my via my Instagram username if you share this photo anywhere" https://instagram.com/messner_photo
Put the camera on an equatorial mount, trailing is more noticeable on the stars than the landscape. That might not work as well in this case though because there’s a detailed foreground object instead of just a horizon silhouette.
Comments
And what other "techniques" are not of the "use photoshop" kind?
I rest my case, but good to know that it wasn't an AI fake. 🙂
@ssamn.bsky.social
"Please credit my via my Instagram username if you share this photo anywhere"
https://instagram.com/messner_photo