informage

is that real?

Yes, apparently (although surely with some heavy postprocessing). I’ve just made the image a link to the NASA page about it – I meant to do that in the first place.

In my opinion this is a complete fabrication. To obtain pictures of stars without any apparent movement requires an azimuth tracking mounting for the camera. And as other reports reports say a “long exposure” was needed to picture the milky way, clearly there is no movement whatsoever in any of the stars, a quite remarkable feat without the ability to precisely track them. However it’s still a striking image.

Lush