Larsen, 51, uploaded the image to his social media channels in mid-October. It quickly went viral, gaining him 15,000 new followers, clocking up tens of millions of views and igniting thousands of comments. About 16,000 working satellites are circling the planet, alongside tens of thousands of defunct spacecraft, rocket parts and debris from payloads breaking up.
He spent about 40 hours layering the individual photos — each of which contained about 25 satellites — over one another in Adobe Photoshop. Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars to reveal the satellites.
A photograph showing thousands of satellites cross-hatching the night sky over New Zealand appeared so extraordinary that the astrophotographer who captured it is fighting accusations it was created by artificial intelligence.
In anticipation of AI accusations and backlash, Larsen documented his creative process on video, which he hopes will also allow viewers to form an emotional connection to the landscape.
Larsen said he set his camera to take an unlimited number of eight-second shots, with a two-second gap between each photo. “I left her running for two hours and captured 578 photos,” he said. The resulting picture shows the sky inundated with about 1,400 satellites and 14,000 trails forming a dense crisscrossing pattern above a mountain. Some viewers dismissed it as AI. Larsen said he understood why.