Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy and skydiver YouTuber Gabriel C. Brown combined their respective skill sets to create a single image that seems too absurd to be real. Again, I urge: in this age of AI-generated imagery, the picture is 100 percent real. It’s a perfectly timed moment where Brown drops from an ultralight plane and appears to plummet across the roiling surface of the Sun.
McCarthy is an Arizona-based sun fanatic who owns a ton of telescopes. He spent weeks planning the image. The plan required aligning a tiny aircraft, a human falling out of said aircraft, and the sun, which all sounds complicated, but in a conversation with Live Science, he assured that it is actually much more complicated than it seems. Luckily, he demonstrated just how complicated it all was in a video posted to Instagram that detailed the process.
After six attempts to line up the plane with the Sun’s narrow field of view, McCarthy finally called the shot. Brown let go. McCarthy fired off a stream of images.
The final photo, titled “The Fall of Icarus,” looks like a daredevil is plummeting through space, slicing across the sun on his way down into the infinite. All the planning paid off. They may have taken six attempts to line up the shot, but they only made one actual attempt to capture it. Actually, that’s all they needed. It was the only shot they had enough time to capture.
McCarthy has made a name for himself with his stunning 100 percent real photos of space and space objects. You might have seen some of his other work, like the International Space Station cutting in front of a solar flare, or his extremely detailed, almost surreal, picture of the moon from back in 2022.
Happened at the best time, too. As I reported in September, the Sun is currently in its most chaotic period of its 11-year cycle. It’s been firing off fierce solar storms and flares, filling our earthly night skies with auroras—including in places that rarely witness the shimmering chromatic hues that occur when Earth’s magnetic field is blasted by solar radiation. All that activity made Brown’s sun dive especially dramatic.
McCarthy posted the photo to Reddit, calling it the “most preposterously fake-looking real photo” he’s ever taken. Just goes to show that you don’t need AI or even Photoshop to create a surreal, literally unbelievable image. Sometimes, real life is unbelievable enough as it is. Just got to be daring enough to capture it.
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