This photo:
It looks photoshopped because it was taken with a camera on a perfectly still tripod, over a period of many many seconds, so it captured a great deal of time, i.e. almost all of the "spiralling".
Other than that, it doesn't look remotely photoshopped to me. It has all the usual earmarks of a photo that captures, in one long exposure, a lot of movement. You can see this with photos of streams, or the ocean, or clouds, they blur over a long period of time, and they blur very neatly.
But what DOES bother me about it is how perfectly set up it is.
I've tried to photograph northern lights, and lightning, and it's really difficult, because you can't frame up the damn camera, you can only guess. There's a lot of luck involved. When you look through the camera at the night sky, it's just black. There's no reference. You really have no idea where you're pointing it! Of course in this shot there's the lit ground, so that wouldn't be such a big deal .... still ....
So what gets me about this photograph is not the actual quality of it, that's the easy part, provided you can actually set your camera up, on a tripod, in a place that affords you a CLEAR VIEW OF THE SKY, which is extremely rare unless you live in the freakin' desert.
Then to have it captured, and have the right exposure, and all of that when you're probably practically trembling with excitement at this absolutely fucking FREAKY thing that's taking place in the sky in front of you .....
That's what bugs me about that photo. It's almost like whoever took it knew it was going to happen ahead of time.
Of course that's pure speculation on my part, based on experience and knowledge of these things.
Maybe somebody just happened to be trying to shoot the northern lights that night (which wouldn't be exactly unusual in that part of the world) and happened to see the whole thing begin.
The freaky black-hole-opening thing at the end is, yes, by far the spookiest, asshole-tightening part of the whole thing, but if the rocket-spinning-spewing-fuel theory is to be believed, I think that video covered it by saying that's when the fuel ran out and the fuel that had already been ejected kept ejecting, thus resulting in what appears to be a spreading black hole.
What's also so weird to me is that humanity isn't talking about this, really. They'd rather talk about Tiger Wood's oh-so-busy cock.
This is gonna go down as one of the weirdest years in history. And one of the weirdest years, personally, for me ever, and in ways that are almost nothing-but-bad.
The last year that was so strange, IMO, was 1989. Tianamen Square, the Berlin Wall falling down, the Romanian Revolution ......
Years that end in "9".