You have probably seen it by now: a lonely rover parked on reddish rocks while a jaw-dropping wall of stars and the glowing Milky Way blaze overhead, supposedly the night sky on Mars straight from NASA. The reality is far less magical. One widely shared video came from a TikTok account called "nasa.curiosity," complete with a NASA logo, and it turned out to be an edited fake that fooled thousands of viewers and even a couple of news websites. Another famous panorama, showing a Milky Way arching over the Perseverance rover, racked up more than 1.6 million shares, yet its creator admitted he stitched real rover photos together with a Milky Way image from elsewhere, so the sky does not represent what Mars looks like. A NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory education specialist also confirmed that the rover cameras simply cannot capture a night sky that detailed.

Here is the twist: real night-sky pictures from Mars do exist, and they are quietly astonishing in their own right. In 2004, NASA's Spirit rover took a five-minute exposure in which the stars show up as streaks because the planet is rotating, with cosmic-ray hits scattered across the frame as tiny points of light. In 2014, Curiosity's Mastcam caught Earth and our Moon shining as two bright evening stars about 80 minutes after sunset, from roughly 99 million miles away, and in 2017 the long-lived Opportunity rover also photographed stars from the Martian surface. These frames are grainy and scientific rather than postcard-perfect, because the rovers were built for studying rocks and dirt, not for dreamy astrophotography. So the next time a gorgeous "Mars night sky" clip lands in your feed, ask who actually made it, because the real story is already wild enough.