A photograph showing thousands of satellites cross-hatching the night sky over New Zealand appeared so extraordinary the astrophotographer who captured it is fighting accusations it was created by AI.

To create his spectacular image – now viewed millions of times online – Brendan Larsen spent two hours in September snapping hundreds of photographs of the night sky over Mount Taranaki in the North Island.

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. Larsen spent about 40 hours layering the individual photos – each of which contained about 25 satellites – over one another, using Adobe Photoshop. Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.

Brendan Larsen, 51, documented his creative process in a video, because he was expecting the accusations that he had used AI.…