How a skydiver was photographed in front of the Sun

Before you ask: no, it’s not AI. What you’re looking at above is a skydiver framed by the roiling chromosphere of the Sun, with its arches and loops of plasma glowing brightly. That’s the result of weeks of meticulous planning, a whole lot of astrophotography know-how, plenty of math, and patience.

Shot by Arizona-based Andrew McCarthy, “The Fall of Icarus” features his friend Gabriel Brown freefalling through the air with the Sun in the background. Beyond being a powerful image, this awe-inspiring composition really makes you appreciate the creativity, ingenuity and human effort that went into the photograph.

The first challenge is getting the subject into the frame. The Sun’s plenty big, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get him in front of it – but then the photographer would be at a fixed spot on the ground and the camera only has a limited field of view. As such, the team had to use a solar position calculator to figure out when and where to position themselves so the plane’s flight path would intersect with the Sun and help them get the skydiver in silhouette.

Then came the actual jump itself. Brown skydived from a small propeller plane at an altitude of roughly 3,500 feet (1,070 m). That put him 8,000 ft (2,440 m) away from the camera – which meant Brown would appear to be moving very quickly through the camera’s field of view. So getting the shot would require precise timing.

“We had to find the right location, time, aircraft, and distance for the clearest shot; while factoring in the aircraft’s power-off glideslope for the optimal Sun angle and safe exit altitude,” Brown noted in an Instagram post. “Then we had to align the shot using the opposition effect from the aircraft and coordinate the exact moment of the jump on 3-way coms!”

This didn’t prove easy in the least. The team made six attempts to correctly position the plane for the shot. However, the photo was captured from the first and only jump of the day – attempting multiple jumps would take a lot of time between having to repack the parachute and restart the process.

Now, to get a dramatic looking Sun in the background, McCarthy shot the Sun with a telescope and a Hydrogen Alpha filter which only lets in specific red wavelength. This is what brings out the detailed appearance of hydrogen in the Sun’s chromosphere, 93 million miles from Earth. The images from the telescope had to be aligned to the region of the Sun captured in the photo with the skydiver, and combined to give us the striking composition that we see in the final result.

McCarthy said the shoot took several weeks to plan before pulling it off earlier this year, and the idea for the shot came about after he and Brown skydived together. Fortunately, he’s had plenty of experience shooting the Sun. In 2021, he combined 150,000 individual images to create a highly detailed 300-megapixel picture of the Sun.

Scroll through the Instagram carousel post below it to see video of the freefall, as well as other behind-the-scenes clips – including the triumphant moment McCarthy nailed the shot on the ground. As the crew points out, Brown’s dynamic pose in the sky adds to the composition – and McCarthy was lucky to capture that in a split second, as opposed to him flailing in the air.

Ultimately, “The Fall of Icarus” is so much more than a beautiful image. It’s a representation of what actually captures the human imagination in the age of AI, when we can generate images of just about anything in seconds – and it highlights what it takes to truly exercise creativity.

You can grab a limited edition print of the photo from McCarthy’s online store here.