[justlurking]

That Photoshop was used to prepare the image doesn't mean the image is a composite.

All I did was repeat the original publisher's warning that they thought it was a composite, given the original anonymous source and the description that accompanied it.

They have since retracted that claim after receiving the photo through "official" channels. They also made some additional comments that a photographer friend explained as one of the likely reasons they thought it was a composite.

They admitted their error, and I wanted to be sure it was passed on.

[aruanan]

All I did was repeat the original publisher's warning that they thought it was a composite, given the original anonymous source and the description that accompanied it.

They have since retracted that claim after receiving the photo through "official" channels. They also made some additional comments that a photographer friend explained as one of the likely reasons they thought it was a composite.

They admitted their error, and I wanted to be sure it was passed on.

Thanks. That's the problem now with things that look just too cool, people assume they had to have been faked. It's interesting to consider what this means: they assume that if something doesn't look like what they experience and that since what they experience is real then something that is outside the realm of their experience is, therefore, probably less than likely to be real. I call to mind the photos of jets breaking the sound barrier. It looks just too bizarre. But then there's the MPEG of the flyby almost at sea level. That was a great MPEG.