A STRIKING photo of an unusual cloud over a mountain that has been widely viewed on Facebook has been mistakenly named as a spot in Donegal.
The caption of a Facebook post says that the photo is of Mount Errigal, the tallest peak in Donegal.
The post has been seen more than half a million times, garnering 563,700 views since it was posted on 8 February.
It has received 202 reactions, 55 comments, and over 1,000 shares from people who saw the photo, many of whom were impressed by what they believed was an image of the Donegal mountain.
However, the photo does not show Mount Errigal in Donegal.
It was taken by a photographer called Makoto Hashimuki who specialises in photography of Mount Fuji in Japan, and who shared the photo on Twitter at the start of February.
The first time the photo was described as showing Mount Errigal was in a tweet from an Irish Twitter account on 1 February, shortly after it was first posted on Twitter by the original photographer.
The Twitter user in Ireland posted the photo with the caption: “Spectacular lenticular cloud over Mount Errigal, Co Donegal.”
The user later attributed the photo to the original location and photographer on 3 Ferbruary and said they had shared it for “amusement and education”.
However, the photo was reuploaded elsewhere, credited to the Twitter user in Ireland, and labelled as Mount Errigal, including a LinkedIn post that received 97,000 reactions and nearly 3,000 comments.
Unfortunately, Mount Errigal is not the mountain captured in the photo.
As well as the original photographer being based at Mount Fuji in Japan, the surroundings of the mountain in the photo do not match up with the landscape of Mount Errigal in Donegal.
In the photo, there are several one and two-story buildings with dark roofs and sand-coloured walls in the foreground.
At one side of Mount Errigal’s base, there is a lake, and on the other sides, there are empty fields and a few small white houses.
The cloud formation in the photo is a lenticular cloud, which forms in curved layers, usually downwind of hills or mountains.
The clouds attracted attention for their UFO-like appearance when they appeared over Irish skies in previous years.
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