To create this composite image , photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together.

This is the most time-consuming photo edit I’ve EVER done!

I left my camera photographing the night sky over Mt Taranaki for nearly TWO HOURS, capturing 578 photographs.

The result? An estimated 14,450 satellite trail appearances, representing approximately 1,400 individual satellites! 😱

I manually masked in EVERY SINGLE TRAIL from the original photographs — approximately 45 HOURS of editing to create this one image!

The Guardian has more on how he created the image (which, despite many online commenters’ beliefs, is not AI):

Larsen, 51, says he set his camera up to take an unlimited number of eight-second-long shots, with a two-second gap in between each photo. “I left her running for two hours and captured 578 photos … That was the easy part.”

The hard part came next.…