How 'The Fall of Icarus' Was Captured — The Shot That Froze a Skydiver Against the Sun

How 'The Fall of Icarus' Was Captured

Standing on the cracked salt of Wilcox Playa, Arizona's largest dry lakebed, astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy braced as freight trains thundered by and a small plane made repeated passes overhead. After months of planning and six failed attempts, McCarthy finally made a single decisive capture: a lone silhouette suspended directly in front of the sun's textured disk.

High above, skydiver Gabriel C. Brown sat on the edge of the plane seat, waiting for McCarthy's signal. The pilot could only fly that morning, so the team had one last chance. McCarthy counted down from the ground — Three, two, one, go! — and Brown leapt. Through a headset linked to McCarthy's phone he called back, 'Did you get it?'. McCarthy did: the camera recorded an arresting silhouette perfectly aligned with the solar disk.

From Childhood Wonder to Ambitious Projects

McCarthy traces his love of the sky to childhood nights spent with glow-in-the-dark planets on his ceiling and backyard telescope sessions with his father. Years later, after buying a second telescope with pocket money and improvising adapters to attach cameras, he turned that fascination into a career. Over six years his shoots grew more ambitious — from capturing rockets crossing the sun to planning this skydiver sequence.

The Logistics and Technical Tricks

The visual required three elements to align: a low sun, a high jumper and McCarthy standing in an exact spot where the plane, the skydiver and the camera path intersected. To help the pilot find the correct position, McCarthy's telescopes acted as alignment aids: when the aircraft reached the spot between the sun and camera, the instruments threw back a bright flash of sunlight that confirmed alignment.

To refine the image, McCarthy used rigorous postproduction techniques. He recorded behind-the-scenes footage and published detailed notes explaining his workflow, including image stacking — aligning and combining thousands of frames to sharpen the sun's surface and reduce noise. McCarthy says he spent roughly 40 hours on postproduction to bring out the sun's texture and preserve authenticity.

Title and Meaning

McCarthy titled the image 'The Fall of Icarus' not purely as a tragic allusion but as a meditation on human ambition and the vast forces beyond our control. The ancient myth of Icarus — who flew too close to the sun and fell when wax in his wings melted — serves as shorthand for both achievement and hubris. For collaborator Gabriel C. Brown, the photograph is 'a testament to human achievement, but also to human hubris.'

Reaction and Skepticism

The image drew both admiration and doubt. Fellow astrophotographer Connor Matherne praised the shot as another example of McCarthy pushing the boundary of what's possible. But as AI tools and sophisticated editing become widespread, many viewers questioned the image's legitimacy. Anticipating this, McCarthy released behind-the-scenes footage and a transparent account of his stacking process to demonstrate the photo's authenticity.

On the salt flat, with trains in the distance and a pilot on a tight schedule, McCarthy and Brown combined technical precision, patience and timing to produce a single striking frame: a human silhouette frozen against a vast, indifferent star.