Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy has pulled off a cosmic illusion that makes it look as though a skydiver is falling past the Sun. The surreal scene — which resembles a sci-fi film — was captured by the Arizona-based photographer, renowned for his dramatic solar imagery.
On Saturday November 8, at around 9 am MST (11 am EST), McCarthy managed to frame a falling skydiver perfectly against the Sun’s fiery disc. He later revealed that the shot — which he fittingly titled “The Fall of Icarus” — demanded an “absolutely preposterous” amount of planning and, in his words, “might be the first photo of its kind in existence.”
The skydiver in the frame is YouTuber and musician Gabriel C. Brown, who leapt from a small propeller-driven aircraft at roughly 3,500 feet (1,070 metres), positioning himself about 8,000 feet (2,440 metres) from McCarthy’s camera. Brown shared behind-the-scenes glimpses on Instagram, including a clip of him and McCarthy celebrating their once-in-a-lifetime capture. “You can see the excitement on my face in the videos,” McCarthy told Live Science. “Seeing it perfectly captured on my monitors was exhilarating.”
Multiple attempts needed to capture the perfect alignment
Incredibly, the image was secured on the first and only jump of the day — but not without challenges. Although they had planned for weeks, McCarthy and his team had to attempt the aircraft-to-Sun alignment six separate times. The moment Brown jumped can be seen in a video posted to X by McCarthy. “It was a narrow field of view, so it took several attempts to line up the shot,” he explained. “We only had one shot at the jump as repacking the parachute safely would take too long for another.”
One of the biggest obstacles was tracking the aircraft itself. The team quickly discovered that the plane was far more unpredictable and difficult to follow through the sky than they had expected. “Capturing the Sun is something I’m quite familiar with, but this added new challenges,” McCarthy admitted.
Despite the hurdles, the resulting image ranks among McCarthy’s personal best — easily in his “top 5” of all time. And that’s saying something. In recent months, he has photographed a “once-in-a-lifetime” moment of the ISS photobombing a solar flare, a SpaceX rocket slicing across the Sun’s disc, a colossal 1-million-mile-long (1.6 million km) plasma plume, an ultra-high-definition lunar mosaic, and even Mars being eclipsed by the Moon.
