Over a span of nearly two hours, Brendan Larsen gathered 578 distinct eight-second exposures to map the heavy satellite congestion above Mt Taranaki. He spent approximately 45 hours editing in Adobe Photoshop to manually mask trails and eliminate stars, debunking online claims that the artwork was artificial intelligence. The final composite reflects an estimated 14,450 trail appearances linked to roughly 1,400 individual orbital bodies, with each raw frame averaging 25 satellites. Photographer Vincent Laforet lauded the final image as important while questioning the authorization allowing these devices to interfere with long-exposure sky photography.
Key points
Each individual exposure captured by the photographer contained an average of 25 satellit…: Each individual exposure captured by the photographer contained an average of 25 satellites.
The artist manually erased stars rather than relying on artificial intelligence to build…: The artist manually erased stars rather than relying on artificial intelligence to build the final composite.
Photographer Vincent Laforet warned that the sheer volume of orbital paths disrupts long-…: Photographer Vincent Laforet warned that the sheer volume of orbital paths disrupts long-exposure photography.
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Stunning Image of Our Satellite-Choked Night Skies
To create this composite image, photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together.
This is the most time-consuming photo edit I’ve EVER done!
I left my camera photographing the night sky over Mt Taranaki for nearly TWO HOURS, capturing 578 photographs.
The result? An estimated 14,450 satellite trail appearances, representing approximately 1,400 individual satellites! 😱
I manually masked in EVERY SINGLE TRAIL from the original photographs — approximately 45 HOURS of editing to create this one image!
The Guardian has more on how he created the image (which, despite many online commenters’ beliefs, is not AI):
Larsen, 51, says he set his camera up 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 next. Larsen spent about 45 hours layering the individual photos – each of which contained about 25 satellites – over one another, using…
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