Andrew McCarthy's awe-inspiring image of a skydiver in front of the sun
Standing in Arizona’s largest dry lakebed, Wilcox Playa, astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy steadied himself as freight trains thundered by, threatening to blur the shot that took months to prepare. The crowd around McCarthy watched one morning last month in tense silence as he attempted and failed during six passes of a plane overhead to get the perfect image.
High above, his friend Gabriel C. Brown was perched on the edge of his plane seat, waiting for the signal to leap. “Originally, we we’re like, if we mess up the first attempt, I can land, repack, go up and try again,” Brown said.
However, their pilot announced that he was only available that morning, according to Brown. With just one more chance to get it right before the sun climbed too high, McCarthy counted down as the plane soared to the right spot.
With this limited window, Brown told McCarthy: “Don’t tell me to jump unless you are absolutely sure.”
The time came and McCarthy counted down, “Three, two, one, go!”
As Brown fell, he asked McCarthy through the headset wired to his iPhone, “Did you get it?”
At last, McCarthy captured it: a lone silhouette frozen in front of the sun’s textured face. “It was perfect,” McCarthy said of the successful attempt. “We knew right away we got something really special.”
A leap of faith
As a child, McCarthy’s room was covered in glow-in-the-dark planets and filled with space toys. At age seven, he would walk out to his backyard telescope with his father, where they would gaze up at Saturn and Jupiter. He was captivated, he recalled, even if at the time he didn’t fully understand what he was seeing.
Years later, when McCarthy described himself as “an adult with a boring desk job” and “500 bucks to kick around,” he decided to buy another telescope. He then gazed at the sky and was overwhelmed by “this feeling that I was just, like, very, very, very small, but also, like, very significant,” he said. “I was like, wow, I’m a part of the universe that is self-aware enough to appreciate the beauty of the universe, and here I am witnessing it. So, I wanted to share that moment with people.”
Eager to capture and spread that wonder, he pressed an old iPhone to the telescope’s eyepiece and took a blurry photo. Unsatisfied, he cobbled together adapters to connect a camera to the telescope.
The photos weren’t very good, he said, but taking them scratched an itch. “I was like, I want to do this even more.”
So, he took a leap of faith and decided to make a career out of it, with a mission of helping others share in his awe — the sense of being small yet connected to something vast.
Capturing the improbable image
Over the next six years, McCarthy’s projects got more complex. After photographing a rocket traveling across the sun , he began searching for a new challenge.
