How a Skydiver Briefly Silhouetted the Sun — and the Real Photo Behind the Stunt

At first glance: impossible

The image looks like a trick: a dark silhouette of a falling man set against the textured disk of the Sun. It isn’t a green screen or an AI composite — it’s a real photograph captured by careful planning, precise geometry and split-second timing.

How they planned it

Skydivers Andrew McCarthy and Gabriel Brown conceived the idea while jumping together. They quickly realized the shot would be extraordinarily difficult: they had to match location, timing, aircraft position, exit distance and the plane’s power-off glideslope to achieve both a safe exit altitude and the exact solar angle for a crisp silhouette.

"We had to find the right location, time, aircraft, and distance for the clearest shot," Brown wrote on Instagram.

Geometry, math and the right distance

Beyond the usual skydiving complications, the pair calculated how far the telescope needed to be so a human silhouette would appear at a comparable scale to solar details such as sunspots and granulation — the mottled cellular texture made by boiling plasma on the Sun’s surface. The sunspots they wanted to show are enormous (tens of thousands of kilometres across), yet the Sun is about 150 million kilometres away. Their geometry showed the camera had to be roughly 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from the jumper.

Paramotor pilot and the jump

To hold that position they hired a paramotor pilot. After trying three pilots they found Jim Hamberlin, who could steer the paramotor so the jumper would fall in front of an active region on the Sun. When McCarthy gave the signal, Brown exited the paramotor and the pilot immediately throttled up to move the aircraft out of the central frame.

Brown left the paramotor from about a 3,500-foot exit altitude. From that height a skydiver typically has roughly 10 seconds of freefall before deploying a parachute, during which Brown reached terminal velocity: about 200 km/h in the belly-to-earth position and up to around 320 km/h in a head-down orientation.

Camera, filters and technique

McCarthy recorded the fall with a Lunt 60mm H-alpha telescope and captured single-frame exposures on an ASI 1600MM camera. One exposure caught Brown’s outline aligned with the Sun, but a single shot could not simultaneously show fine chromospheric structure and the Sun’s wider surface.

To preserve chromospheric detail McCarthy used his standard solar technique: he tracked the Sun’s slight motion and stacked hundreds of short exposures to reduce turbulence and blur while keeping the chromosphere’s features sharp at that moment. Because each exposure only covered a small patch of the solar disk, he mosaicked those tiles into a wider composite — a common method in astrophotography and professional astronomy.

Why the silhouette looks like a hole in space

Photographing the Sun risks saturating a camera sensor, so McCarthy used an H-alpha filter. H-alpha isolates a narrow red wavelength emitted by hydrogen as it drops to a lower energy state, letting photographers see the Sun’s chromosphere where dramatic features such as sunspots and flares form while reducing overall brightness.

Humans do not emit H-alpha light; we only reflect a tiny fraction of stray photons at that wavelength. That makes Brown’s falling body appear as a stark dark silhouette against the glowing chromosphere.

Focus and safety

Keeping two subjects at vastly different distances sharp is normally difficult, but by positioning the photographer and subject far apart they both fell within the same depth-of-field zone, so the skydiver’s silhouette and the solar detail registered in focus. McCarthy later confirmed that Brown landed safely.

Result: a striking photo born of meticulous planning, astronomy technique and perfect timing — and entirely real.

If you’re interested in prints, McCarthy offers versions of the images through his store.