YouTuber <\/a>and musician Gabriel C. Brown, who leapt from a small propeller-driven aircraft at roughly 3,500 feet (1,070 metres), positioning himself about 8,000 feet (2,440 metres) from McCarthy\u2019s camera. Brown shared behind-the-scenes glimpses on Instagram, including a clip of him and McCarthy celebrating their once-in-a-lifetime capture. \u201cYou can see the excitement on my face in the videos,\u201d McCarthy told Live Science. \u201cSeeing it perfectly captured on my monitors was exhilarating.\u201d<\/p>\nMultiple attempts needed to capture the perfect alignment<\/p>\n
Incredibly, the image was secured on the first and only jump of the day \u2014 but not without challenges. Although they had planned for weeks, McCarthy and his team had to attempt the aircraft-to-Sun alignment six separate times. The moment Brown jumped can be seen in a video posted to X by McCarthy. \u201cIt was a narrow field of view, so it took several attempts to line up the shot,\u201d he explained. \u201cWe only had one shot at the jump as repacking the parachute safely would take too long for another.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the biggest obstacles was tracking the aircraft itself. The team quickly discovered that the plane was far more unpredictable and difficult to follow through the sky than they had expected. \u201cCapturing the Sun is something I’m quite familiar with, but this added new challenges,\u201d McCarthy admitted.<\/p>\n
Despite the hurdles, the resulting image ranks among McCarthy\u2019s personal best \u2014 easily in his \u201ctop 5\u201d of all time. And that\u2019s saying something. In recent months, he has photographed a \u201conce-in-a-lifetime\u201d moment of the ISS photobombing a solar flare, a SpaceX rocket slicing across the Sun\u2019s disc, a colossal 1-million-mile-long (1.6 million km) plasma plume, an ultra-high-definition lunar mosaic, and even Mars being eclipsed by the Moon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy has pulled off a cosmic illusion that makes it look as though a skydiver is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":181380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[77],"tags":[102489,102486,102490,18,102485,102483,19,17,102488,102484,133,102487],"class_list":["post-181379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ayyappa-swamy-photo","tag-biprofile-photo-maker","tag-birsa-munda-ka-photo","tag-eire","tag-good-morning-photo","tag-google-photo","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-nishu-deshwal-photo","tag-photo-resizer-in-kb","tag-science","tag-vitthal-rukmini-photo"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115551539328260932","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}