These beautiful space photos are actually just a bunch of junk in a scanner

The photo below could be of a planet and its lone moon, drifting through a nebula of gas and dust.

But it's no view from a deep-space probe.

It's all food sitting on the glass plate of a home office scanner.

Navid Baraty, a freelance photographer, creates these stunning cosmic forgeries by arranging a mixture of spices, groceries, and glassware on an Epson V37 scanner. (The device's removeable cover, he tells Tech Insider, is vital to achieve a black background.)

He even based his latest series around a fictional space probe called Wander - short for Wormhole Accelerated Nomad Delivering Exploratory Reconnaissance - which "visits" each scene.

Below are 18 of our favorite scanner photos, which we heard about from The Salt at NPR. You can find more of his space scenes on the Wander Space Probe's Instagram or Facebook.