Astrophotographer captures incredible real photo of skydiver falling in front of the sun

Annie Reneau
Fri, 21 Nov 2025 05:52:20 +0000
Art, Astrophotography, Fall of icarus, Photo, Photography, Real photo, Skydiver falling, Skydiving, Sun photos

With artificial intelligence being used to "create" images left and right in 2025, the art of photography has become even more relevant. Human-created art has always held value, and when someone creates something incredible through skill, talent, and effort, it will always be more valuable than AI-generated fakery.

Case in point: "The Fall of Icarus." Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy and friend Gabriel Brown created a photo of a skydiver falling in front of the sun entirely from their knowledge of astrophotography and physics. The final product is a remarkable, one-of-its-kind photo anyone would be hard-pressed to recreate.

Gabriel Brown skydives in front of the sun in "The Fall of Icarus" by astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy. Courtesy of Andrew McCarthy

"Immense planning and technical precision was required for this absolutely preposterous (but real) view: I captured my friend @BlackGryph0n [Gabriel Brown] transiting the sun during a skydive," McCarthy wrote on X. "This might be the first photo of it's kind in existence."

McCarthy shared that Brown did the calculations after the idea came to them while skydiving together. Brown shared a video of the moment the shot was taken as he jumped from a small propeller-powered craft and described the preparation that went into creating the moment and capturing it in a photo on Instagram:

See on Instagram

"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. Then we had to align the shot using the opposition effect from the aircraft (shout out to the pilot @jimhamberlin) and coordinate the exact moment of the jump on 3-way comms!

"As if that wasn’t hard enough, we had a myriad of malfunctions that almost led to the shot not being captured… But as you can see, against all odds, we got it on the sixth try!"

Naturally, people have questions about how McCarthy got such interesting details in the sun. McCarthy explained that he kept shooting the sun after Brown cleared the frame and used that data to create a stacked image.

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"When capturing the sun through these telescopes, repeated exposures are needed to eliminate atmospheric turbulence and sensor noise," McCarthy explained on X. "Every single astrophoto is a stacked photo, it’s necessary to overcome atmospheric limitations and sensor noise. Not the same as compositing, which is artificially combining two images from different scenes."

But capturing the details of the sun wasn't the challenge here. McCarthy has been doing astrophotography for a long time. It was capturing the skydiver that made it a challenge. Brown was a little over two miles away from McCarthy shooting the image, and of course the sun behind him about 93 million miles away. McCarthy had to know exactly how to set up the equipment and they had to time everything out just right in order to get the image they were looking for.

See on Instagram

McCarthy's other space photography is worth a look as well. He recently captured a gorgeous shot of a supermoon with colorful details we can't see with the naked eye.

"Last night I captured over 60k photos of the largest supermoon of the year using two telescopes to reveal the hidden color in 119 megapixels," he wrote on Instagram. "I call the print 'Artemis Beckons,' after the next crewed lunar mission. These colors are there naturally on the moon—they’re just so faint you can’t really pick them out. When thousands of photos are stacked together, the fidelity of the image allows them to be drawn out."

The blue color on the moon is titanium, he shared in the comments: "The moon isn’t gray, but *slightly* colorful based on mineral composition. With a high quality photo, I can increase the saturation and reveal these colors. Blue is from titanium on the surface, and orange is from iron."

See on Instagram

What an extraordinary way to see celestial bodies we look at all the time but never fully see—and in an art form that AI will simply never be able to truly replicate.

You can find prints of McCarthy's astrophotography, including "The Fall of Icarus," on his website, cosmicbackground.io.