When I visited New Zealand it was not unusual to spot satellites in the crystal clear night skies. However, I was gobsmacked by the astonishing photograph (above) that was created by Brendan Larsen.

To create his spectacular image – now viewed millions of times online – Brendan Larsen spent two hours in September snapping hundreds of photographs of the night sky over Mount Taranaki in the North Island.

Larsen, 51, says he set his camera up to take an unlimited number of eight-second-long shots, with a two-second gap in between each photo. “I left her running for two hours and captured 578 photos … That was the easy part.”

The hard part came next. Larsen spent about 45 hours layering the individual photos – each of which contained about 25 satellites – over one another, using Adobe Photoshop. Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites…

The resulting image shows the sky inundated with about 1,400 satellites and 14,000 trails forming a dense crisscrossing pattern above the mountain.