Standing at the bottom of Arizona's largest dry lake, Wilcox Playa, astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy held on as freight trains rushed by, threatening to blur the image he'd spent months in the making. The crowd around McCarthy watched in tense silence one morning as he tried and failed during six flights of the plane overhead to get the perfect image.
High above, on the edge of the plane's seat, sat his friend Gabriel S. Brown, waiting for the signal to jump. “Initially we thought if we failed the first attempt, I could land, repack, get up and try again,” Brown said.
However, according to Brown, their pilot announced that he was only available that morning. With one more chance to make it before the sun rose too high, McCarthy began a countdown as the plane flew to its destination.
With such limited time, Brown told McCarthy, “Don't make me jump until you're absolutely sure.”
The time came, and McCarthy began counting down: “Three, two, one, go!”
As he fell, Brown asked McCarthy through a headset connected to his iPhone: “Do you understand?”
Finally McCarthy captured it: a lonely silhouette frozen before the textured face of the sun. “It was great,” McCarthy said of the successful attempt. “We knew right away that we had something really special.”
Leap of faith
As a child, McCarthy's room was covered in glow-in-the-dark planets and filled with space toys. At the age of seven, he and his father went to the telescope in the backyard, where they looked at Saturn and Jupiter. He recalled that he was fascinated, although at that moment he did not fully understand what he was seeing.
Years later, when McCarthy described himself as “a grown man with a boring office job” and “500 bucks down the drain,” he decided to buy another telescope. Then he looked up at the sky and was overcome by “the feeling that I was just very, very, very small, but at the same time very significant,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’m part of a universe that is self-aware enough to appreciate the beauty of the universe, and here I am witnessing this. So, I wanted to share this moment with people.”
Eager to capture and spread the wonder, he pressed an old iPhone against the telescope's eyepiece and took a blurry photo. Unsatisfied, he assembled adapters to connect the camera to the telescope.
The photos didn't turn out very well, he said, but taking them made him itch. “I thought: I want to do this even more.”
So, he took the plunge and decided to make a career out of it, making it his mission to help others share his thrill—the feeling of being small but connected to something huge.
Capturing an incredible image
Over the next six years, McCarthy's projects became more complex. After photographing rocket flies through the sunhe began looking for a new challenge.
Before filming The Fall of Icarus, McCarthy took this photograph of a rocket flying through the Sun. – Andrew McCarthy/cosmicbackground.io
It was only after his first skydiving experience that McCarthy settled on his next project and decided to team up with Brown, an avid skydiver, to bring the new idea to life.
“The light bulb went off because we had just finished a parachute jump. We thought: What if someone jumps out of a plane in front of the sun?” – McCarthy said.
It sounded almost impossible. To get the perfect shot, the sun had to be low, the jumper high, and McCarthy positioned exactly where their paths coincided.
When the pilot aimed the plane at the ideal position between the sun and the camera, the telescopes acted like mirrors and emitted a bright flash of sunlight, indicating to the pilot that they were lined up.
They called it “The Fall of Icarus.”
For McCarthy, the name is not about tragedy, but rather about the power of nature compared to our own smallness. The sun, he explained, is a perfect example of a force we cannot control. No matter what we do, it continues to burn.
McCarthy used image compositing, straightening and merging of thousands of frames to sharpen the details of the sun and reduce noise in the photo. – Andrew McCarthy/cosmicbackground.io
The legend of Icarus tells of a young man who escaped imprisonment with his father Daedalus by flying on wings made of feathers and wax. Before they set off, Daedalus warned his son not to fly too high, where the sun's heat might melt the wax, and not too low, where the sea spray would dampen the wings, making them too heavy to fly.
Icarus, overwhelmed by the power of flight, ignored the warning and rose higher until the sun softened the wax and sent him flying into the sea. This myth has become a symbol of both human ambition and our limitations. The photograph, Brown said, is “a testament to human achievement, but also to human arrogance.”
But art is not defined only by those who create it. “I’d rather see what people think when they look at it,” McCarthy said.
Prove it's not AI
Connor Matherne, a fellow astrophotographer who had worked on a previous project with McCarthy, saw the published image and realized, “He's done it again. This is another impressive photo that really pushes the envelope.” He added that McCarthy's work raises the bar for astrophotographers and inspires others to try the seemingly impossible.
McCarthy, however, said much of the online discussion about his photo questions its legitimacy, a problem many astrophotographers are facing with the advent of artificial intelligence and advanced editing tools.
Anticipating public skepticism, McCarthy filmed behind the scenes footage when he was getting ready and taking the shot. He also revealed details of his post-processing, using image compositing—aligning and combining thousands of frames to sharpen the details of the sun and reduce noise.
“It can be frustrating to spend 40 hours on a photo and have people dismiss it as fake,” Matherne said. But for Matherne and McCarthy, the joy lies in capturing and sharing real moments that reveal the hidden beauty of the universe.
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