Photographer Brendan Larsen’s composite image makes the growing presence of satellites in night skies visible at an extraordinary scale. Made from nearly two hours of photographs over Mount Taranaki, New Zealand, it contains an estimated 14,450 satellite-trail appearances, representing about 1,400 individual satellites. The image is not AI-generated: Larsen set his camera to take 578 eight-second exposures, with two-second gaps, then assembled them by hand.
The technical work took far longer than the shooting. Larsen spent around 45 hours in Photoshop layering the images and manually masking out stars to reveal every satellite trail. As the dense pattern emerged, he realized that continuing would make the image more striking. Its impact is both aesthetic and unsettling: the streaks show how crowded the night sky has become, and how satellites can interfere with astronomical photography. Photographer Vincent Laforet described being first startled and fascinated, then feeling betrayed when he recognized the streaks as satellites - and realized they may have spoiled his own long exposure. His reaction turns the image into a question about who gets to fill the sky with objects that affect everyone’s view of it.
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