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It's hard to take great pictures of space when you don't have a large telescope or an expensive camera, but you can FAKE great pictures.

All you need is a scanner, some drinking glasses, water, food colouring, salt and CAT FUR (yes, seriously). Then you're on your way to creating a domestic nebula.

Photographer Navid Baraty has been honing the art of fake space pics for some time now. He came up with the idea for a fictional space probe called WANDER that travels by tunnelling through wormholes - shortcuts through spacetime.

The pictures - made on his scanner - are supposed to be snapshots taken on the probe's cosmic journey.

In reality, they are not very other-worldly at all. They are made up of stuff Baraty found around the house.

Baraty has been fascinated with space since he was a child. “When I see the cosmos through photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and other earthly telescopes, I'm often left without words. I think the awe and wonder of space ignites our innate curiosity as humans,” he told CNET.

The makes the images by places objects on his Epsom scanner and leaving the lid open. He makes perfectly round swirling planets by filling glasses with coconut milk and food colouring - the round base of the drinking vessel then becomes the planet.

He says it's a matter of trial and error. "I did maybe 20-30 glasses before I got one to look how I wanted," he said.

The stars are made by sprinkling spices and salt around the surface of the glass.

"The biggest challenge of this project is trying to figure out a way to recreate the next realistic space effect," he told Mirror Online.

"For example, I'd like to make a comet and am trying to figure out the best way to create the diffuse light that you see in the tail of a comet. It's definitely challenging to do this on the smooth surface of glass!"

So convincing are his pictures that "a lot of people" believed his WANDER space probe story and thought "there was an actual spacecraft taking these images".