An astrophotographer has captured a stunning shot of a falling skydiver matching perfectly with the sun’s fiery surface. A flying adventurer appears to be rolling through the vacuum of space in front of our home planet.
Andrew McCarthy, an Arizona-based astrophotographer who specializes in photographing the sun, snapped the unlikely photo around 9 a.m. MST (11 a.m. ET) on Saturday (November 8). The photo, dubbed “The Fall of Icarus,” required an “absolutely ridiculous” level of planning and “may be the first of its kind in existence,” McCarthy wrote in a post on social platform X.
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“If you watch the video, you can see the excitement on my face,” McCarthy told LiveScience. “It was refreshing to see it reflected perfectly on the monitor.”
McCarthy added that this image was taken on the first and only jump of the day. But despite weeks of careful planning, it took six attempts to properly align the aircraft with the sun. You can see the exact moment Clark jumped in the video McCarthy posted to X (see below).
“It took a few tries to line up the shot because the field of view was so limited,” McCarthy added. “We were only able to make one jump because it would take too long to repack the parachute safely.”
The biggest problem the pair faced was that the aircraft they used was much harder to track reliably in the sky than they had originally thought, McCarthy said. “I’m no stranger to photographing the sun, but this added new challenges.”
The moment of the jump captured in hydrogen alpha light to resolve the sun’s atmosphere. We decided to publish the photos in print. It can be seen here: both a close-up shot and showing the entire disk of the sun: https://t.co/K4DovGV4ni pic.twitter.com/hYHg7rZXdK November 13, 2025
McCarthy added that this new photo is definitely one of the “top five” of his career so far.
In the past few months, he has also taken other solar transit photos, including the International Space Station photobombing solar flares and a “once in a lifetime” shot of a SpaceX rocket appearing to punch through the solar disk.
In the past, it has also captured stunning images of a million-mile-long (1.6 million km) plasma plume erupting from the Sun, ultra-high-resolution images of the Moon’s surface, and impressive images of Mars being eclipsed by the Moon.