No, this viral video does not show a gigantic moon at the North Pole

Seven million views for a successful but misleading montage. A video that allegedly shows a lunar eclipse at the North Pole has been shared over 67,000 times on Twitter. We see the moon, of a surprisingly large size, emerging on the horizon, above a landscape without a trace of ice. The star continues its course by performing a rotation and covering the Sun, before disappearing.

The video, which is not credited, aroused admiration and mockery in comments, some Internet users marveling at the images, while others pointed out their unrealism.

The images also circulate on Instagram, Tumblr or Facebook.

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The video is a creation of Aleksey Patrev, a Ukrainian artist who creates computer generated images. Hoax Eye, a fake hunter account, had found her in 2021 on TikTok. The video also figure on the artist’s YouTube channel, where he is known as Aleksey_N. She garnered half a million views there in ten months.

If you fell in love with the sequence, the creator even put it up for sale in the form of NFTs. On the sale page, he specifies that this work, entitled Supermoon [Superlune] shows “a thirty-second lunar flyby between Russia and Canada”. North pole point here.

In addition to the fact that the video was created by a specialist in computer graphics, several elements show that it is a montage. In addition to the size of the Moon, which is far too large when compared to the Sun, “we should not see the Moon rotating”, reacts Sandrine Guerlet. “It is in synchronous rotation with the Earth, that is to say that it makes a turn on itself at the same time as it makes a turn around the Earth, in twenty-eight days, and it therefore always presents the same face to us, whether we are at the North Pole or anywhere on Earth,” adds the scientist, who specializes in the study of planetary atmospheres.

Another questionable element, the Moon goes through several phases in the video, which is impossible in one day: “At the start of the video, there is like a full moon (the face in front of us is lit) while the Sun is behind the Moon, adds the researcher. The Moon cannot change phase, going from full moon to new moon in a few minutes, it takes fourteen days…! “A video that does not go round.


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