‘The Fall of Icarus’: How the remarkable shot was captured

By Lily Hautau, CNN

(CNN) — 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.

It wasn’t until his first experience of skydiving that McCarthy settled on his next project and decided to team up with Brown, an avid skydiver, to bring a new idea to life.

“The lightbulb went off because we just got finished skydiving. We’re like, what if somebody jumps out of a plane in front of the sun?” said McCarthy.

It sounded nearly impossible. To get the perfect shot, the sun had to be low, the jumper high, and McCarthy positioned precisely where their paths would align.

When the pilot flew the plane into the perfect position between the sun and the camera, the telescopes acted like mirrors and sent up a bright flash of sunlight, indicating to the pilot that they were lined up.

They titled it ‘The Fall of Icarus’

For McCarthy, the name is not about tragedy, but rather the power of nature compared to our own smallness. The sun, he explained, is a perfect example of a force we can’t control. No matter what we do, it keeps burning.

The legend of Icarus tells of a young man who escaped imprisonment with his father, Daedalus, by taking flight on wings made of feathers and wax. Before they set off, Daedalus warned his son not to fly too high, where the sun’s heat could melt the wax, and not too low, where the sea’s spray would dampen the wings making them too heavy to fly.

Icarus, overcome with the power of flight, ignored the warning and climbed higher, until the sun softened the wax and sent him falling into the sea. The myth has come to symbolizes both human ambition and our limits. The photo, says Brown, is a “testament to human achievement, but also to human hubris.”

But art isn’t only defined by those who create it. “I’d rather see what people think when they look at it,” said McCarthy.

Proving it’s not AI

Connor Matherne, a fellow astrophotographer who worked on a previous project with McCarthy, saw the published image and knew: “He’s done it again. This is another spectacular photo, really pushing the envelope.” McCarthy’s work is seen as raising the bar for astrophotographers, inspiring others to attempt the seemingly impossible, he added.

McCarthy, however, said that much of the online discussion of his photo questioned its legitimacy, a challenge that many astrophotographers face with the rise of AI and advanced editing tools.

Anticipating the public skepticism, McCarthy filmed behind the scenes footage as he prepared for and captured the shot. He also made public the details of his postproduction work using image stacking — aligning and combining thousands of frames to sharpen the sun’s features and reduce noise.

“It can be frustrating to spend 40 hours on a photo only to have people dismiss it as fake,” Matherne noted. But for Matherne and McCarthy, the joy comes from capturing and sharing real moments that reveal the universe’s hidden beauty.

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