Social media users shared an image online claiming to see Earth, Venus and Jupiter in a red sky as seen from Mars. This image is a digitally rendered illustration, not a real photo of Mars.
Examples can be seen here, here, here and here, with some posts attributing the photo to NASA.
Based on Google’s reverse image search, it appears that the image first appeared in August 2012.
Astronomer Phil Plait wrote an article here on August 10, 2012 in Slate’s ‘Bad Astronomy’ blog. Plait points out that the picture immediately looks false with the landscape too saturated, and the sky is wrongly colored with too many clouds and a “reproduced by software”.
He concludes that the letters “NE” visible in the lower left corner are a giveaway that the image was made using planetarium software such as Starry Night or SkySafari, which is used to display the sky from other planets.
Snopes traced the image to a blog here where it was originally posted on July 15, 2010 (here).
A variation of the image was posted earlier on June 29, 2010 here on the same blog.
Louise Riofrio, the author of the blog, confirmed in an email to Reuters that although she does not remember which program she used, she is the creator of the illustration.
Riofrio explained that at the time she was working as a scientist at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, and “assisted the researchers who discovered signs of fossil life on the Martian Meteorite ALH84001 in 1996.”
Actual photos released by NASA that show the Mars skyline look different from the photo in the claim. This can be seen in a photo of 2014 showing the earth here, a photo of 2014 showing the earth and the moon here and a photo of 2020 showing the earth and Venus here.
VERDICT
Failure. The image shows a planetarium software version of what Earth, Venus and Jupiter would look like from Mars. This is not an actual photo released by NASA.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.