Appreciation post: the photographer who actually labels their star names right

I keep seeing these stunning photos of galaxies and nebulas in here but half the time the captions are totally wrong. Like someone will post a pic of the Andromeda Galaxy and call it the Triangulum Galaxy and it's not even close. Ive been into astrophotography for about 2 years now and I started noticing this pattern where folks just guess the names or copy from a bad source. It matters because new people come here to learn and end up confused about what they're actually looking at. I spent 15 minutes last week trying to figure out if a photo was the Orion Nebula or the Running Man Nebula and the poster didn't clarify. How hard is it to double check before you hit post? Has anyone else run into this where you see a photo and you know the label is off but it gets tons of upvotes anyway?

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zara_miller2d ago

Oh man, I feel this so much. I spent a solid hour once trying to ID a galaxy someone posted as the "Southern Pinwheel" but the photo was clearly the Black Eye Galaxy. The dusty ring gave it away. What helped me was I started cross-checking with a sky atlas app on my phone before I shared anything. Now I always drop a source link or the exact catalog number in the comments. Makes it way easier for beginners to verify.