North America is about to experience a dramatic lunar eclipse as the “Blood Moon” eclipse turns the moon blood red overnight tonight (March 13-14).
That means skywatchers around the globe are anticipating a flood of incredible lunar images over the next few days. However, the boom in AI image generation and the availability of photo editing software mean that fake images are easier to create than ever. That means lunarphiles face a challenge: How can they sort the real deal eclipse images from the fakes?
No worries — Space.com has your six! We’ve teamed up with Catalina Sky Survey scientist, asteroid hunter, and RankinStudio astrophotographer David Rankin to help you spot the fakes this eclipse season!
“Fake images are definitely on the rise. Faking images in tools like Photoshop used to take a lot of skill. It’s very easy to do now with the assistance of AI-generated graphics,” Rankin told Space.com. “This isn’t just impacting astronomy but every area of photography from landscape to modeling, to wildlife, and more.
“People are desperate for likes and recognition, so they are willing to engage in editing techniques that I think go past basic image manipulation and into the realm of fantasy artwork.”
Rankin explained that these images often get passed off as “photographs,” which can impact real astrophotographers and fool the public.
“I have been a photographer for many years, and it can be a pretty competitive business. There are always people out there trying to push the envelope, and oftentimes it gets pushed too far,” he said. “I think it’s important that if we are passing images off to fans as ‘photography,’ those images are rooted in reality, not fantasy.”
Tip 1: Fakers ‘go big!’
While we space fans know that the moon is spectacular in all of its guises, if you were creating a fake image of our lunar buddy, then you might be inclined to exaggerate its proportions somewhat.
A vast, dominating moon can be one of the easiest ways of distinguishing a fake image, especially if you have landmarks to use as a guide.
“There are obvious tells and less obvious tells. If at first glance the moon appears larger than you’ve ever seen it relative to the foreground or sky, it probably has been scaled up,” Ranking said. “This was the most common manipulation I found when digging into fake Lunar eclipse images.
“When you shoot wider, say at 20-50mm, the moon just doesn’t appear large in the image, so people are tempted to scale it up.”
Tip 2: Look to the stars!
Let’s say there are no manmade landmarks to look to to assess the size of the moon. What do you do then? No worries; the cosmos has you covered.
You can check the angular size of the moon in relation to background stars to determine whether an image has been tampered with or is a composite (i.e., a genuine image of the moon has been dropped into an image of the sky in which it was originally absent).
“Unfortunately, no matter what focal length you shoot at, it is an astronomical fact that the moon doesn’t occupy much more than around 1/2 a degree against the night sky,” Rankin added. “It is very easy to show images have been manipulated when the moon is presented at many degrees wide relative to the stars on the sky.”
Tip 3: What are you doing here?
Another noticeable sign of a fake image is when the moon is placed in an area of the sky where it just doesn’t go.
For example, Rankin said the moon right next to the Big Dipper asterism is a sure sign of fakery.
This is even easier for an event like a total lunar eclipse rather than a full moon, as these latter events can only be seen in select regions of the globe.
For instance, this event is only visible from North America. If you see a constellation or asterism in an eclipse image that wasn’t visible over North America on Thursday night/ Friday morning (or whenever that eclipse occurred), you are clearly looking at a fake!
Of course, we can’t all be adept at identifying constellations and asterisms and pinpointing their locations in the sky at any given time. Fortunately, Astrometry.net can be used to do this without the fuss.
Input an image into the site, and it provides you with astrometric calibration data and lists of known objects falling inside the field of view, helping to crack down on fakes!
Tip 4: Go deeper!
Astrophotographers are generally a pretty proud bunch, and so they should be. This means that when they share an image, they usually give information about when and where that image was taken. Often, they will also be happy to share details of the equipment they used to capture that image.
If this info is missing from an image, say when it is shared on social media, you could always ask the photographers.
One issue that is more common with full moon images than those of eclipses, which are pretty unique, is the publication of an old image that can be mistaken for one recently taken.
One way of determining if an image is actually an older picture taken during a different full moon is to run it through a Google image search to see if it has been published before.
This isn’t going to come as much of a surprise to most readers, but you can’t really trust what you see and read on social media.
This isn’t foolproof, but you can check that the account you see images on is legitimate and an official account of the organisation or person whose name it bears.
This doesn’t guarantee that you are seeing a genuine image, but if that organisation has a good reputation and some scientific credibility, like NASA or the European Space Agency (ESA), then it’s more likely that its images will be the genuine article.
Also, those types of organisations are likely to have sites of their own. Check if images are replicated there, and you may find more of the details listed above, like where and when the images were captured, to help verify their authenticity.
“I think social media sites do a really poor job of highlighting faked images, and it is in their best interest not to do it,” Rankin said. “Social media platforms are driven by traffic and ads. If an AI video or image gets more traffic than a real one, that means more money for them.
“It is akin to the spread of disinformation in my mind, and as we have seen in the past, social media companies don’t seem to care much about combating it. I think this is a disaster, and it erodes the bedrock of reality in favor of fantasy and conspiracy.”
Tip 6: Do it yourself!
The easiest way to ensure that eclipse photos, or images of any other astronomical event, are the real deal is to take them yourself!
While it might be too late to get out and catch this lunar eclipse, Space.com has a guide that will help you set out on this astrophotography journey for yourself.
Even if you miss the Blood Moon, you could get the chance to follow some of the advice in this guide when the partial solar eclipse rolls around in September 2025.
If you want to get a closer look at the moon during lunar eclipses or at any other time, check out our guides to the best telescopes and best binoculars.
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Astrophotographer Rankin intends to take this Blood Moon total eclipse a little easier than usual and enjoy the spectacle.
“I plan to at least go watch the total lunar eclipse,” he concluded. “I think eclipses are beautiful to view and I’ve shot many of them.
“Sometimes it’s nice to just take the photons into your retinas and not try to capture every single thing in digital format, though.”
Rankin gives examples of some of the eclipse photos he has debunked on his website.
Editor’s note: If you snap a great picture of the moon during March’s total lunar eclipse, and would like to share it with Space.com’s readers, send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com
