Meanwhile, here's another verified photo:

The image isn't a still from a Christopher Nolan movie; instead it's a Reuters picture of the skyline of lower Manhattan shrouded in storm-induced darkness. That one lucky, lighted building? The Goldman Sachs headquarters. Though power outages encompassed everything from 14th Street on down -- and though the building at 200 West Street falls within that zone -- the building made use of a generator to keep the lights on. (Or to keep the power on, as it were.) This move was, unsurprisingly, controversial.

It's worth noting (Alexis here!) that part of the reason this photo is so striking is that it is very dark and the contrast is very high on the image. I took a look at other skyline photos of New York from earlier in the year and found that it wasn't that hard to make the Goldman building look ridiculously lit up by just pushing the contrast up and the brightness down. Like this:

I also found that if you took the Goldman image above and performed the opposite operation -- increasing the brightness, decreasing the contrast, the building didn't look quite so awkwardly bright in the early morning light.

Does this all make the Reuters photo less real? No. But it's a good reminder that the reality a photograph captures is always subject to the vagaries of lens and light. Small tweaks in the way you capture light can lead to very different images. (If you'd like a deeper reflection, I'd refer to Errol Morris.)

Also verified is this incredible image of a tanker washed up last night on the shores of Staten Island.

And ... yes, it is real. Here's video from last night's ABC Eyewitness News broadcast showing the tanker at rest. The journalists heard a report of the tanker's grounding; they sent reporter Michelle Charlesworth down to check it out for herself. She was greeted with a scene that, save for being actual, was incredible. "We just couldn't believe it," Charlesworth said in her broadcast. "It looks like something out of a movie."

*****

This is an easy one: this scuba diver in a flooded Times Square station was trotted out before the storm. Gizmodo (which is down) had it up at 11:05am. It's fake. At best, think of it as an artist's conception.

Everything about the lit-up Jane's Carousel pictures from Dumbo scream fake. One, the carousel is gorgeous. Two, it's lit up like a beacon amidst the dark of the flood waters. Why are the lights on? Three, it seems difficult to get this photograph from that area. Shouldn't the photographer have evacuated?

Well, yes, it turns out. Anna Dorfman, a book designer who lives in Dumbo, took this photo shortly before evacuating. She's confirmed that she took it. Another Instagram user and Dumbo resident, Ana Adjelic, also posted a photo of the carousel from a different angle. And we also got independent confirmation from a journalist Jeff Howe that another friend who lives in the area had sent him similar photographs. These may be the most improbable and striking images of the night, and they are real. There will be moments of serendipity and islands of beauty amidst any storm.