That stacked galaxy photo everyone is sharing is a complete crop job

I keep seeing this one deep field image going around on Instagram and Twitter, the one with all those overlapping spiral galaxies. People are acting like it's some new Hubble or Webb discovery. But I recognized the exact same field from a 2018 paper. Someone just cropped out the original labels and pumped up the saturation. Why does nobody fact check before hitting share anymore?

3 comments

3 Comments

brianreed1mo ago

Wait, that specific deep field with the three overlapping blue spirals that looked like they were almost touching? I remember that from a 2018 paper too, it was part of the CANDELS survey. So someone just grabbed that frame, cranked the contrast and saturation, and people think it's brand new data from a 2024 release? That's actually wild, I saw that same image shared by a science page and they didn't even credit the original authors. It's the same exact cosmic alignment, just without the scale bar and the little filter labels in the corner. Makes me wonder how many of these "amazing new discoveries" are just old stuff getting repackaged with a filter.

christopherw341mo ago

My buddy Matt runs a small astronomy blog and last week he got absolutely roasted in the comments because he shared that same deep field image without checking it first. He wakes up to like 40 replies calling him out, one guy even linked the original 2018 paper with timestamps and everything. The top comment on his post was just a screenshot of the original image with the scale bar still on it, side by side with his cropped version. He ended up deleting the whole post and didn't touch Twitter for three days. I still give him crap about it every time we grab a beer.

aaron_mitchell1mo ago

Poor Matt got the full internet roast treatment. I once posted a picture of what I thought was a rare green comet, turns out it was just an out-of-focus streetlamp through some fog, and some guy with a telescope profile spent an hour in my replies explaining the difference between coma and chromatic aberration. At least Matt's friend had the decency to link real science, that streetlamp guy just called me a disappointment to amateur astronomy.

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