Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy has created a cosmic illusion that makes it look like a skydiver is falling around the Sun. The surreal scene, reminiscent of a sci-fi movie, was captured by an Arizona photographer known for his dramatic solar images.
On Saturday, November 8, around 9:00 a.m. MST (11:00 a.m. EST), McCarthy managed to perfectly frame the falling skydiver against the fiery disk of the Sun. He later revealed that the image – which he aptly titled “The Fall of Icarus” – required an “absolutely absurd” amount of planning and, he said, “may be the first ever photograph of its kind in the world”.
The skydiver in the footage is YouTuber and musician Gabriel C. Brown, who jumped from a small propeller plane at about 3,500 feet (1,070 meters) and positioned himself about 8,000 feet (2,440 meters) from McCarthy’s camera. Brown shared behind-the-scenes looks 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 exciting.
It takes several tries to capture the perfect alignment
Incredibly, the image was secured on the first and only jump of the day – but not without problems. Although they had been planning for weeks, McCarthy and his team had to make six attempts to align the plane with the Sun. The moment Brown jumped can be seen in a video McCarthy posted on X. “It was a narrow field of view, so it took a few tries to line up the shot,” he explained. “We only had one shot at the jump because it would take too long to repack the parachute safely for another.”
One of the biggest obstacles was tracking the plane itself. The team quickly discovered that the plane was much more unpredictable and difficult to track in the sky than they expected. “Capturing the Sun is something I’m pretty familiar with, but it added new challenges,” McCarthy admitted.
Despite the obstacles, the resulting film ranks among McCarthy’s personal bests—easily in his “top 5” of all time. And that’s enough to say. In recent months, he has photographed the moment the ISS photobombs a once-in-a-lifetime solar flare, a SpaceX rocket crossing the solar disk, a colossal 1 million-mile (1.6 million km) plume of plasma, an ultra-high-resolution lunar mosaic, and even a lunar eclipse.
