From artificial suns to “alien motherships,” our fascination with the universe offers a ripe bounty for content creators, with sometimes just the sheer beauty of it all enough to capture our attention and silence the inner skeptic.
It was with little surprise then that a video, which claimed to show a giant, bright red moon arcing over the Swiss Alps, attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers in just a matter of days, with few questioning its veracity.
The Claim
A tweet, posted on November 19, 2022, shows a video of what is described as a “Spectacular Moon view from 4800 meters of the Alps.”
The tweet has received more than 200,000 engagements in less than two days.
The Facts
The video has resurfaced over the weekend, but in fact it has been circulating since at least 2021 across YouTube, Twitter and other social media posts, where it’s been viewed tens of thousands of times.
However, the footage not authentic, nor is it even a depiction of the moon.
As noted on Twitter, when the clip first began circulating in 2021, the celestial object in the sky featured in the video was Mars, as can be seen by its canyons, lake beds and craters across its surface.
Crucially, the Red Planet has never appeared (nor could it appear) that large in the night’s sky either, and instead appears to been digitally edited into the video.
As reported by Sky & Telescope, the most recent occasion that Mars was its largest in the sky was in October 2020, when it was separated from the earth by 39 million miles, still more than 160 times further than the moon.
Its appearance was described as a “bright, campfire-orange ‘star’”, not the highly detailed and gargantuan object seen in the video.
There are also other artifacts in the video that are indicative of digital alteration. For example, the lights which illuminate across the mountainside don’t appear to be attached to any light source, seemingly shining above the tree lines independently.
While images of the moon, particularly during a supermoon phase, have shown it both in extraordinary detail and size, some of these photos present a visual illusion due to false perspective.
For example, some of the most striking images of supermoons have been taken at the Glastonbury Tor, an historic monument in south-west England. In these photos, the scale of the shot makes it appear as if it has stretched landscape, much like in the video shared on Twitter.
However, as can be seen from photos taken without a telescopic lens, the moon (while still magnificent) can be seen in the right proportion relative to its distance to the earth.
Objects which hover over the horizon naturally appear larger too, due to the manner in which our brains perceive distance.
The moon has been photographed from Mont Blanc in a similar manner, with large telescopic lens appearing to show it at a greater size and scale than images taken with a fuller landscape ahead of it.
Images of space, moon and the Milky Way are common fodder for misleading visual content on social media, often taken at face value and attracting millions of views or engagements.
Newsweek recently debunked a video which claimed to show a UFO “refueling directly from our Sun,” which was in fact a body of gas protruding from the sun.
Another video, shared in September 2021, claimed to show the moon orbiting so close to earth it filled the majority of the sky. The video contained a number of telling inconsistencies, such as the moon spinning on its axis far too quickly.
The Ruling
Misleading Material.
This viral image has been circulating online for some time and appears to be a digitally manipulated animation or film.
The object in the photo is not actually the Moon, but Mars, which cannot be observed from Earth, with the naked eye, in the scale or detail as seen in the video.
While the moon has been photographed appearing larger than usual elsewhere, those photos are typically taken with a telescopic lens, against a horizon or behind an object, making it appear far closer or larger than it actually is.
FACT CHECK BY Newsweek’s Fact Check team
