Solar Eclipse image 'taken' from ISS which sent Twitter into meltdown is FAKE

The picture appeared to capture the moment where the Moon passed directly in front of the Sun, blocking out all light to Earth with the Milky Way in the background.

Tweeters posted the image thousands of times and claimed that it has been taken by amateur photographers onboard the ISS, which houses Russian, US and Italian astronauts.

However, it turns out the photo that went viral today as the solar eclipse was across the UK is actually a computer-generated picture first made in 2009.

The image was the work of a user of online art community DeviantArt and was created using a programme called Terragen 2.

The image of the Milky Way in the background was later added in with photo-altering software programme Photoshop.

Despite this, Twitter users have shared the image as if it was real with one post being re-tweeted more than 15,500 times and favourited by almost 10,000 people.

During the previous eclipse in 1999 the Russian space station Mir took an incredible picture that showed Britain blanketed in a huge shadow.

This shows how an eclipse would look from ISS with the Sun not being blocked at all.

Whereas in the image that went viral on Twitter, the Moon and Sun are seen in complete alignment.

But if that was the case in reality then nobody on Earth would notice an eclipse was happening.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Dr Edward Bloomer, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, said: "The Earth is orbiting around the Sun and sometimes is slightly closer and sometimes further away, and the Earth is also wobbling around on its axis.

"Likewise the orbit of the Moon around the Earth is elliptical and slightly tilted so it’s rare for the Sun, Earth and Moon to actually line up.

"When they do come into perfect alignment it is called the syzygy effect and when the Moon is closest to Earth you have a total eclipse."