After the super blue moon graced the skies over Earth over the past couple of days, it was perhaps inevitable that social media would be clogged with extraordinary photos of the phenomenon.
Also inevitable is that many of these photos would be completely fake; published only to get attention or [more likely] to rack up followers for Facebook pages.
And the anonymous Facebook page EBUZZ took things a little further. The unknown admin didn’t just post a fake photo of the super blue moon, instead they posted a fake live video of it. See below.
How does that work?
Simple really – steal a good looking still image of the moon from the Internet, in this case a 9 year old photo taken by amateur photographer Chris Kotsiopoulos, put the still image onto a video, add a fake timestamp, and finally overlay the sound of wind to the image, and voila – a fake live video.
Of course those behind the Facebook page also overlaid a prompt to follow their page, naturally.
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While upon a cursory glance the live video may have appeared real – the moon doesn’t move that fast, after all – many spectators grew a little suspicious when the moon hadn’t appeared to have moved at all, even after several minutes elapsed.
Eventually many cottoned on to the fact that the video they were watching was actually just a photo, and Facebook finally removed the video, but not before it accumulated a staggering 16 million views. The Facebook page EBUZZ remains online.
A number of photos have spread purporting to show the rare super blue moon trifecta, and there have also been many amazing genuine photos.
The incredibly rare phenomenon happens when three things occur at the same time – firstly the supermoon, where the moon is closer to Earth than normal, making it appear up to 14% larger in the sky. Secondly the blood “red” moon caused by a lunar eclipse, where light is refracted off the surface of the Earth causing a reddish hue (which was only visible at certain places on Earth) and thirdly the Blue Moon, which refers to the second full moon in a month.