Two Hour Time-Lapse Shows Satellites Over New Zealand
This remarkable night-sky image is so bizarrely surreal that the man behind it has been accused of using artificial intelligence. But he did not.
To create his extraordinary image - now viewed millions of times on Instagram - Brendan Larsen spent a couple of hours in September snapping photos of the night sky above Mount Taranaki in the North Island.
Larsen says he set up his camera to take an unlimited number of eight-second-long shots, with a two-second gap in between each photo. “I left her running for two hours and captured 578 photos … That was the easy part.” The hard part came afterwards when Larsen spent about 45 hours layering the individual photos - each of which contained about 25 satellites - over one another, using Adobe Photoshop. He even erased the stars so that the satellites would be more obvious.
The resulting image shows the sky covered with about 1,400 satellites and 14,000 trails forming a dense crisscrossing pattern above the mountain. Which, coincidentally, was the first mountain in New Zealand to be recognised as ancestral and in 2024 was granted legal personhood.
When Larsen uploaded the image to his social media channels, it quickly went viral, notching up tens of millions of views and, perhaps unsurprisingly, provoking legions of comments - many of which accused him of using AI to create a fake picture. However, Larsen had anticipated this response, and had therefore documented his process on video.
While satellites don’t yet overwhelm the sky to the naked eye, Larsen worries about the future state of the night sky. He hopes his image will ignite debate and reflection over how satellites can be used responsibly. “We can raise awareness, and through that get a groundswell of support for protecting the night sky.” That would be good news.
