The competition requires submission of raw files and detailed processing information, making it one of the more rigorous contests for verifying authentic astrophotography.

If you were trusting photos to be pictures of the real world before AI then you should never have had that trust in the first place. You should thank AI companies for opening your eyes to what was already fooling you.

Even if they are real, does it really matter when the camera is doing superhuman work with things like a 27 km zoomed in picture of a building or composite of 300 separate exposures. If you get to combine exposures, why not just expose a moon separately from a building and combine them in the computer?

I'm not aware of any photograph of this sort that would fool an astronomer. The times and dates wouldn't work if it was faked.

They are highly processed and often stacked but I see nothing there that looks fake.