On April 15, 2025, a photo posted to social media sites like Facebook and X claimed to show a stunning image of the Andromeda galaxy taken over the Swiss Alps. In the comments of the posts, however, users questioned whether the photo was real, edited or generated by AI.
Snopes contacted several astrophotographers in order to learn more about the art form of astophotography and to get an expert’s opinion on whether the photo was legitimate. One photographer, Ladi Svoboda, told us via email that while capturing a similar image was quite doable, he felt it was likely that this image was edited beyond what would be considered normal and was not scientifically accurate.
Svoboda was the only astrophotographer to respond to our request for information, as of this writing. Because capturing a similar image would be possible (and in fact, similar images do exist), and Snopes has not obtained additional expert opinions, we are not definitively rating whether the image is edited beyond what’s normal.
Taking photos of astronomical objects like stars and galaxies is not easy. Getting high-quality images of the night sky requires finding a place that’s dark enough for the stars to be visible, getting a clear night with no clouds and then setting the camera to let in as much light as possible.
However, stars move in the sky as the Earth spins, and the long camera exposures of astrophotography capture that movement. As such, astrophotographers often use equipment like star trackers in order to get clean images of the sky, and take as many as possible.
The ground, however, doesn’t move. As such, in order to create these kinds of images, astrophotographers must take separate photos of the sky and of the ground and then composite the two images together. Svoboda said this editing creates what astrophotographers call a “nightscape,” and that combining images in this way is a “widely accepted and common practice” in the field.
In the truest of senses, then, yes, the photo is edited, but so is almost every other photograph in this style.
The photo does appear to feature the Andromeda galaxy and a few of its smaller neighbors. However, according to Svoboda, they aren’t in the right spot in the sky. Using an online tool called Stellarium, he checked what the night sky over Switzerland looked like over the last six months, but couldn’t find a good match for the positions.
“At around 10:30 PM on 3.3.25, Stellarium shows that Andromeda would have been lower in the sky and slightly off-position compared to how it appears in the image,” he wrote. “Even when I checked back as far as October 2024, the starfield appears flipped, rotated and super high in the sky. So, while the image is beautiful and certainly within reach for any astrophotographer, it’s likely that the galaxy was repositioned to suit the composition of the foreground.”
Svoboda said that while the styles of an individual photographer might vary, most astrophotographers try to stay accurate to reality. “Personally, I would not post or share such a picture,” he said.
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