Skydiving the Sun
Skydiver & musician Gabriel Brown and astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy teamed up to capture these incredible photos of Brown transiting the Sun while skydiving. You can see a video of the jump and some behind the scenes calculations on Instagram.
We had to find the right location, time, aircraft, and distance for the clearest shot; while factoring in the aircraft’s power-off glideslope for the optimal sun angle and safe exit altitude. Then we had to align the shot using the opposition effect from the aircraft (shout out to the pilot @jimhamberlin) and coordinate the exact moment of the jump on 3-way coms!
As if that wasn’t hard enough, we had a myriad of malfunctions that almost led to the shot not being captured… But as you can see, against all odds, we got it on the sixth try!
That sounds….complicated. But the results speak for themselves. More coverage of this on Petapixel and Colossal.
As Petapixel notes, the photos are composite shots:
After he captured the shot of Brown, he then made the image “super high-res” by shooting the Sun on another telescope and “assembled a mosaic of the entire Sun”, which he later matched with the features in Brown’s photo.
(thx, alex)
Comments 1
That second image somehow blasts a Christopher Nolan "womp" into my head. Just stunning, but I want so badly to see it in slow motion.
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