The Night Sky Over Mount Taranaki Turned Into a Highway of Satellites On the evening of 9 September 2026, New Zealand photographer Brendan Larsen pointed his camera toward the volcanic silhouette of Mount Taranaki and simply left it running. For nearly two hours he captured 578 separate 8-second exposures. When he later stacked and painstakingly masked every trail by hand—a process that took roughly 45 hours—he revealed something startling: an estimated 14,450 satellite trails belonging to about 1,400 individual satellites streaking across the sky above the mountain. What looks at first like an abstract web of light is a compressed record of real orbital traffic. Many of the trails come from large constellations such as Starlink; others are older satellites, scientific platforms, and debris. Because each exposure lasts only eight seconds, a single satellite can appear multiple times as it crosses the frame, which is why the total number of trails far exceeds the number of distinct objects. Hidden in the same frame are two tiny moving lights on the mountain itself—two climbers descending Taranaki in the dark, their headlamps visible across the entire sequence. Larsen has emphasized that every trail is real, not AI-generated. The finished composite is both a technical achievement and a quiet document of how rapidly the night sky is changing. A clear evening over a remote New Zealand volcano now contains more moving points of light than most people realize, even if the majority remain invisible to the naked eye without long exposures or careful timing after sunset. The image is a single evening’s worth of orbital motion made visible—thousands of silent passages above one of New Zealand’s most iconic peaks.

He seems grate-ful

Mitra Farmand Jackson Pollock with cats