Months of careful planning and calculations went into the shot. Then, the team had only one jump attempt to get it right

Margherita Bassi - Daily Correspondent

December 10, 2025 2:14 p.m.

"The Fall of Icarus" Andrew McCarthy, Cosmic Background

The scene sounds like something straight out of an action thriller: a skydiver drops out of an aircraft, their dark silhouette plummeting across the surface of a giant, fiery star.

The final product? Even more mesmerizing: a still shot of the skydiver, upside down with arms spread among sunspots.

That’s right. The celestial body is the sun, and the image is an actual photograph of skydiver Gabriel Brown, known as blackgryph0n on Instagram.

“Immense planning and technical precision was required for this absolutely preposterous (but real) view,” astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy, who goes by the username cosmic_background on Instagram, wrote on X. “I captured my friend @BlackGryph0n transiting the sun during a skydive. This might be the first photo of it’s [sic] kind in existence.”

Titled “The Fall of Icarus,” presumably in reference to the Greek myth about the inventor Daedalus’ son, who fell into the sea after flying too close to the sun, the image also shows intricate structural details of the sun, such as loops and small flares. That’s thanks to a special telescope filter that allows a view of the atmospheric layer above the sun’s surface.

“You can see the excitement on my face in the videos [posted on social media],” McCarthy tells Live Science’s Harry Baker. “Seeing [the image] perfectly captured on my monitors was exhilarating.”

 Capturing "The Fall Of Icarus" ☀️🪂🔭

McCarthy and Brown came up with the idea earlier this year after a skydiving get-together, Brown writes on Instagram. They discussed how cool—and difficult—getting a solar skydiving shot would be. Describing both himself and McCarthy as “stubborn,” Brown writes that they started organizing the ambitious endeavor.

While the idea of photographing a skydiver as he falls across the sun, relative to a photographer’s perspective, may sound fairly straightforward to some, the reality was extremely complicated.

“Depending on how high the sun is in the sky, the dynamics of it would completely change,” McCarthy tells Space.com’s Josh Dinner. “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, they calculated “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,” he adds.

The duo carried out their project on November 8 at a dry lakebed in Willcox, Arizona. The area’s flat and open landscape allowed the pilot of the paramotor—a powered paragliding aircraft that took Brown up before his dive—to clearly see McCarthy’s position a couple of miles away, which was crucial for the shot’s alignment, McCarthy explains to the outlet.

When the pilot saw that the aircraft’s shadow was going to meet McCarthy’s spot, where many cameras were set up, he lowered the paramotor’s power to glide across the sun’s face while McCarthy gave further steering commands, the photographer tells IFL Science’s Alfredo Carpineti*.* Getting the right perspective required six passes with the aircraft.

“It was a narrow field of view, so it took several attempts to line up the shot,” McCarthy tells Live Science. “[But] we only had one shot at the jump as repacking the parachute safely would take too long for another.”

McCarthy simultaneously worked with two frames—a wider one to guide the pilot, and a narrow one to get a closeup of the skydiver as he fell in front of an extremely active region of the sun. After capturing the photos, McCarthy turned the wide-shot image “into a 100-plus-tile mosaic,” per Space.com, which he combined with the zoomed-in shot to show the entire sun behind the skydiver.

Fun fact: Light show

The active region of the sun captured in the solar skydiving photo was responsible for the auroras that lit up the North American skies in early November.

The astrophotographer tells Live Science that this new composite photo is one of the top five he’s ever taken.

And Brown, the skydiver, is also in awe of the team’s feat. “I still can’t believe we pulled this off!!” he writes on Instagram.

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