Skydiver Silhouette Overlaps the Sun: The Golden Moment of Extreme Sports Photography

A person leaps from a thousand meters up, body inverted, arms spread wide, with the sun's roiling chromosphere behind them. Their silhouette aligns perfectly with a solar prominence, as if someone is falling from a star.

This photo went viral across the internet in November 2025, and millions of people had the same first reaction: this has to be Photoshop. But it wasn't.

An "Absurd but Real" Photo

This work, titled "The Fall of Icarus," was created by Arizona astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy. McCarthy runs the Cosmic Background website and is known for his high-resolution photographs of the moon and sun. This time, he decided to attempt something no one had ever tried: having a real person skydive across the surface of the sun.

The skydiver was his friend Gabriel C. Brown. The two came up with the idea during a skydiving event and then spent weeks planning every detail. At 9 AM on November 8, 2025, on a dry lakebed in Willcox, Arizona, McCarthy set up his telescope while Brown took off in a powered paraglider. Within one hour, they made six attempts.

Why This Photo Was Nearly Impossible to Capture

First, the distance. McCarthy calculated that the camera and the skydiver needed to maintain a distance of 1.5 miles (about 2.4 kilometers) so that the human silhouette would be proportionally harmonious with sunspots on the solar surface. Too close and the shadow would be blurry; too far and it would be invisible.

Then there were the depth-of-field limitations of the telescope. Brown had to jump from approximately 3,500 feet (1,070 meters) to stay within the telescope's focus range. The paraglider pilot had to precisely place the skydiver directly in front of the solar disk within the telescope's field of view from 1.5 miles away.

They recruited three pilots, and Jim Hamberlin ultimately completed the mission. As the sun continued to rise, the angle shifted with each attempt. The sun's position at 9 AM gave them only about a one-hour shooting window. On the sixth flight out of six, they finally aligned with an active region of the sun.

What You Didn't Know: How Hydrogen-Alpha Filters Reveal the Invisible Sun

The churning plasma arcs and loop structures on the sun's surface in the photo aren't something an ordinary camera can capture. McCarthy used a Lunt 60mm hydrogen-alpha telescope paired with an ASI 1600mm astronomy camera. The hydrogen-alpha filter only allows red light at a wavelength of 656.28 nanometers to pass through, enabling photographers to see sunspots, prominences, and flares on the solar chromosphere. It's this technology that gives the sun its dramatic red surface texture in the photograph.

McCarthy himself acknowledges this is a composite image, but the compositing method differs from Photoshop fabrication. He first captured a high-resolution image of the solar surface, then overlaid the moment the skydiver crossed the sun with the solar detail, ensuring the regions of both images matched exactly. This is a common post-processing technique in astrophotography, aimed at increasing resolution rather than creating scenes that never existed.

Absurd, but Real

McCarthy used one phrase to describe this photo on social media: "absolutely preposterous, but real." In an era flooded with AI-generated images, the bar for "real" keeps rising. Getting people to believe a photo is genuine has become harder than faking one.

McCarthy and Brown spent weeks of preparation, precise mathematical calculations, three pilots' efforts, and six flights to achieve that one moment of perfect alignment. Perhaps that's what this photo is truly saying: in a world where anything can be faked, the most awe-inspiring things are always those moments that require a real price to obtain.