‘Icarus Falling’: How an Astrophotographer Made a Skydiver Look Like He’s Falling Into the Sun

This isn’t a literal fall — it’s an incredible photographic feat. The shot required meticulous planning from Arizona-based astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy, who specializes in capturing images of the Sun. He said on social media that it may be the first photo of its kind.
In the image, you can see skydiver, musician, and blogger Gabriel S. Braun soaring through the air against the backdrop of the scorching surface of the Sun, which is 93 million miles away from Earth. To achieve this extraordinary shot, Braun jumped from a small powered paraglider. He leaped from a height of 3,500 feet, with the distance from the photographer being about 8,000 feet.

Without diving into the technical details, in addition to weeks of careful planning and calculations, Andrew McCarthy needed immense patience and a range of telescopes and cameras. The result is a stunning image of the skydiver that appears to be falling onto the perfectly aligned, blazing surface of our star.
Meanwhile, Braun had to make six attempts to align the paraglider with the Sun before he finally made his jump.

The photo features Andrew McCarthy and Gabriel S. Braun.
“In the video, you can see the incredible excitement on my face,” McCarthy said in an interview with Live Science.
McCarthy says this image ranks among the top five he’s ever taken.
Over the past few months, he has captured other images of the Sun as well. Among them is a rare shot of the International Space Station flying over a solar flare, as well as an image of a SpaceX rocket seemingly slicing through the solar disk.
Previously, McCarthy captured a plasma plume stretching 1.6 million kilometers from the Sun, and he also created an incredible image of Mars being overshadowed by the Moon.