It’s called “The Fall of Icarus,” and it is the hottest new photo (literally) from astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy.
Skydiver and friend of McCarthy, Gabe Brown, can be seen falling across the face of the sun in the new photograph, which the two built around a seemingly impossible idea around an alignment of freefall, pilot precision and high-definition solar photography.
The concept for the photo came about after McCarthy shot the solar transit of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch using a similar hydrogen-alpha (h-alpha) filter — a wavelength that reveals the sun’s chromosphere and fine magnetic structural details. McCarthy and Brown brainstormed other solar transit photo ideas during a skydiving trip, which quickly led the two to wonder if that transiting object could be a person.
The mechanics of such a shot were not a simple point-and-shoot endeavor. McCarthy said the first hurdle was understanding whether the sun’s altitude would allow both the aircraft and the skydiver to intersect a telescope’s field of view in a controlled way.
“Depending on how high the sun is in the sky, the dynamics of it would completely change. A plane can only transit the sun very, very briefly if it’s high in the sky, just thanks to laws of physics. And if it’s low in the sky, then the skydiver doesn’t have enough safety margin to pull the chute. So we did some math, and we figured out there was a sweet spot in the morning where the sun was low enough that we could coordinate the aircraft, but high enough that the skydiver could still pull the chute and land safely, and also, importantly, the skydiver would be within focus.”
McCarthy said that optical physics added another hard constraint. That’s because the telescope’s depth of field narrowed the altitudes where Brown could appear sharp in freefall.
“There’s a depth of field consideration, where, if a camera is focused on infinity, there is a near focus limit where something that is closer than a couple miles away starts to get soft focus, and that’s dependent on the aperture of the scope. And there’s a different depth of field for every instrument used. So we had to consider all these factors when we were planning for the shot. I have to confess, Gabe did most of the math there. I did the focus calculations. He did the safety calculations, because it was his safety that was going to be on the line. So obviously he wanted to be sure that the jump would be safe.”
Once the math was done, McCarthy and Brown needed to find a wide-open location with some generous airspace.
The pair chose the Willcox Playa Fly-In — an annual gathering spot for ultralight pilots on a vast dry lakebed in southeastern Arizona. The area’s miles-wide, perfectly flat terrain offered a favorable environment both for Brown’s dive and landing as well as the visual alignment of the aircraft to capture the shot from several miles away.
Brown made the jump from an ultralight aircraft timed to cross the sun from McCarthy’s viewpoint on the desert floor, creating a silhouette that had to pass through a narrow field of view only a few arcminutes wide.
To prepare for the shoot, here’s what McCarthy used to catch Brown’s fall:
- Lunt 60mm h-alpha telescope with a 2.5x Powermate and an ASI 1600mm camera
- AR 127 mm doublet refractor telescope modified using a hydrogen-alpha light and a Daystar Quark chromosphere eyepiece, and an ASI 174 mm
- Sky-Watcher Esprit 150mm modified using a Lunt wedge with a Z CAM E2-S6
- Canon R5 with 800 mm lens with white light aperture filter
(You can safely take your own sun photos with our best solar viewing gear guide and picks for the best solar telescopes. Also check out our Canon EOS R5 camera review for astrophotography.)
McCarthy said the landscape itself made the attempt achievable.
“There’s this dry lake bed in Willcox, Arizona that’s just many, many square miles of flat land, and it’s a perfect place for something like this.” That openness also gave their pilot a clear line of sight to McCarthy’s exact position, which he says was essential for lining up the aircraft with the sun.
“A large, open, flat area was ideal for us. It would also make spotting me easier, because in order for this to work, I’ve got to be on the ground a couple miles away, and the pilot would need to be able to see where I am on the ground so he can line up his shadow with me.”
McCarthy said the pilot relied on reflected sunlight to steer the ultralight into alignment.
“You get this little bright spot from all the reflections scattering off the aircraft. And [the pilot] was able to see that bright spot and guide it towards my truck in the desert. Once that bright spot was lined up with me, the telescope optics would all light up like a Christmas tree because they’re perfectly reflecting the sunlight back to the pilot, and that’s how he would know he was close to being in alignment with the sun … From there, usually I could start seeing the Ultralight’s canopy, the big parachute thing that’s on top of the paramotor. So I would start to see that in the silhouette of my monitors, and be able to guide him the rest of the way.”
McCarthy said they could usually tell within seconds whether a pass was workable or not. “It was very difficult to coordinate those adjustments, but once he was in front of the sun, we could usually tell right away if the shot was going to work out or not.”
He concentrated the shot on a specific, highly active region of the sun, rather than the full solar disk.
“I wasn’t actually looking at the full suns through most of my soaps, I was looking at a small part of it because there was this active region … in the solar chromosphere, which is when I was shooting in hydrogen alpha … I was seeing all these complicated loops, the way the spicules were behaving, you can see the sun spots, and you could even see little micro flares happening where little bright spots were showing up. And that was such an interesting feature. That was also the active region responsible for the auroras we all saw around the world a couple days or a few days ago.”
To manage both the aircraft’s positioning and the tight solar composition, McCarthy worked in two scales at once. He used a larger field of view to guide the pilot — a wider framing that let him track the ultralight’s approach, see the canopy silhouette, and verbally guide the aircraft into position with enough margin to correct errors. But the final silhouette required him to switch into a much tighter crop centered on that active region.
McCarthy said that dual-frame workflow was the only way to get Brown to intersect the one sliver of the sun where the silhouette would land cleanly.
“I had to use a larger field of view to guide the pilot into the small field of view, and then, more importantly, make sure that when he jumped, he passed through that field of view where you can see this really tight crop around the active regions, and that’s where I got that close up shot.”
The wider image was later assembled into a 100-plus-tile mosaic, giving McCarthy a full-disk context image of the sun to pair with the much tighter “Fall of Icarus” shot — the one showing the full scale of the star, the other cutting down to the volatile patch where Brown’s silhouette passed.
McCarthy said it took six passes over roughly an hour for the aircraft to achieve the right line, with the climb of the sun making each attempt more difficult.
“[The pilot’s] passes got better and better as it went along. However, the sun was climbing in the sky, and because the sun was climbing the sky, even with his power off, when he was approaching the cameras, relative to the sun, it would look like he was rising because the glide slope of the aircraft was so flat. It made it difficult to time the shot, just because we couldn’t keep him in frame for very long, but it ended up working out.”
“Once he was lined up just right, I called out the command, 3, 2, 1, go! And he jumped. And it happened to be perfect. It was an incredible moment to actually capture that and see that happening live on the monitors.”
Brown’s silhouette cutting through the active region became the finished artwork “The Fall of Icarus.”
<em>To see more of Andrew McCarthy’s amazing astrophotography, visit his website at https://cosmicbackground.io