Oh, it's real. I helped Edlund restore it. Apparently, it was an odd duck leftover at the end of the show and the model guys gave it to him. I've seen it sitting in pieces in his office for a long time before he put it together. Richard put the wings on, not me, so it is entirely possible that the port wing is on upside down or even backwards. The wings just slip over the mounting rod. They aren't even glued down. I likely would have just slapped the one wing one too. (Well, maybe not slapped.......)
The ship is missing one of the wing hub covers. The top hatch is a period casting, but with modern paint. That's the only thing not specific to that ship. When he reassembled it, Edlund realized that the top cover was not the one used with the ship (it had a hole in it for mounting rod that had been subsequently repaired). He did have another 'spare' hatch cover that was intact and had been primed, but not painted. I took that primed piece, did a color match to the screen used part, and repainted it.
Taking some photos of it myself, I can tell you it is a very strange shade of gray. If it is underexposed, it really reads as blue. If overexposed, it really washes out. Check out the cover of SciFi & Fantasy Modeler magazine's Star Wars issue. The back cover has a shot of Dykstra next to a pyro TIE and it looks almost light gray. I now know how they can film a model that is so blue against a bluescreen.
Another thing I noticed is the thickness of the wings. Or more specifically, the thinness of the wings. they are about 1/4" thick and maintain that thickness all the way back to the hub. Some of the replicas I've seen are thicker at the hub than they are at the edges. There is a lining in between the sheets of Koolshade to prevent light passing through. There was a bit sticking out of the damaged wing. It's just paper. Looks like construction paper or black butcher paper. Might even have been borrowed from the optical department.
There is an aluminum mounting rod that goes out from this central mount point in the cockpit. (Actually, it's more like an aluminum tube that has a piece of aluminum rod that is tapped on one end inserted into the tube.) The wings are attached directly to the aluminum. There are a couple of resin parts that get glued down to the outside of the rod that form the little detail arms near the hub.
Below are some shots I took before it went off and a couple I took at Profiles. You can see how the same paint reads differently, depending on the lighting, as well as some of the other details I mentioned.
Apparently, there were a couple of bidders that stayed in the hunt up till the 300k point.
Gene