Kelvin Hennessy gets a Snopes page!

Fake video!

Actually, not. But it was remarkable enough for some people to think it was a fake.

We've featured one of Kelvin Hennessy's remarkable photos before. One of his favourite themes is an oversized moonrise with a terrestrial subject (often the Byron Bay Lighthouse) in the foreground. I think my personal favourite is the lighthouse with the Andromeda Galaxy rising behind.

To achieve this effect, he gets a lot of distance between himself and the foreground. Because the foreground subject is very small and the whole shot is magnified by the telescope, the background Moon appears very large.

In October, Kelvin made a new video, and published it on a couple of social media platforms. I've attached a few frames here, but the full video is well worth a watch.

The reaction to the video was probably not what Kelvin was expecting, with accusations that it had been faked. One commenter said that the background Moon and foreground (lighthouse and people) had been blended together. So what was true?

The solution came from an equally unexpected source. The Internet myth-busting team at Snopes got involved. They did some research and linked to another photo showing a wider angle.

Snopes concluded the video is real. That came as no surprise to Kelvin, of course, who had put in so much planning and care into its creation, but it's good to get the tick!

Some technical details:

For these particular shots, you need a serious telescope with the highest quality optics and a good amount of magnification. Kelvin uses a 127mm saxon FCD100 triplet APO refractor.

For the sensor, he used a ZWO ASI 294MC-Pro cooled astronomical camera.