This is a classic example of a simple idea that no one had ever done before. The execution was complex, of course, and Andrew McCarthy is one of the most skilled astrophotographers. But once you get the idea, a number of people could have done it--but no one ever did.
Makes you wonder what other similar ideas are out there! You can bet McCarthy is already thinking some.
p.s.: My brush with celebrity is that I saw an Andrew McCarthy post on Quora when he was first getting started with astrophotography and gave him a few tips. Always important to remember that everyone was a beginner at one point: https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-pro-tips-for-astrophotog...
I had an idea for survey planes once. During calibration, they fly grid patterns, basically like a hashmark (#), to get overlapping data for comparison.
Doing that kind of flight at night (makes sense for lidar! not so much for photo..), against a clear sky with at least some stars, and stacking the resulting photos, would give you a grid pattern of green/red/white aircraft running lights in front of the heavens.
The overlapping pattern is! the flight pattern. The overlap is not some calibration artifact, it is the product for any sort of stereo evaluation.
That is the flight pattern used on calibration flights, which are used to generate the internal/external calibration values for the camera / laser installation.
Standard wide area ortho photo collection can be done with a series of parallel lines, as long as there's enough forelap/sidelap between photos. Same for standard wide area lidar collection.
I happen to live at the crossing of two major flight lines, E-W and N-S, so I might actually attempt to do that. Maybe a lot of 1 tenth exposures could be enough. Trial and errors to get started, as usual.
> a number of people could have done it--but no one ever did
My personal definition of "genius," is someone who sees things from a different angle, and can express it in terms we can implement.
It's not doing well on IQ tests; It's that ability to think "outside the box," and, crucially, to express that vision in terms that us normies can use.
I remember Damien Hirst's response to people saying that anyone could have created his "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living"[1].
He'd simply respond with "But you didn't, did you?".
I think that Hirst had a point.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physical_Impossibility_of_...
It's not like sharks haven't been preserved for display before, they just didn't call it art (barring counting taxidermy as an art form).
Then again, I'm also one of those people who thinks duct taping a banana to a wall is also not art.
There are all types of geniuses. By confining its definition to selected variants of "outside the box", you've defined a new box in a different coordinate system.
I somewhat agree that this isn't the only definition of genius, but this is a pretty important one. If you look back at the most successful scientists, they were not just mad scientists with grand ideas, they were also able to explain their ideas in ways that other people could understand and believe it's correct science.
Turning that back to HN. You may have an amazing startup idea, but you can't do it alone. You need to convince people to join your team, investors to give you funding and customers to buy your product. Yes, even scientists need to be good in sales.
Well … I’m not a genius.
I always did well in IQ tests, but I tend to look at things the way most folks do.
Your advice there is really valuable. Thanks for providing it. I've always wondered how to post-process my night images, and this is a really good guide for that.
Glad it helped! I definitely encourage you to continue practicing post-processing. There is a lot of magic there, and it's fun too.
Love that technique with splitting B&W and colour, doing processing on B&W, then recombining. It's incredibly obvious in hindsight, especially with how common it is in digital art to draw in B&W and colour "in post". A fun little egg of Columbus that I'll be having some fun with over the holidays. Thanks for the link!
> Makes you wonder what other similar ideas are out there!
There are examples of planes silhouetting the sun or moon. There are examples of the ISS. There are examples of planets (Mercury/Venus) crossing the sun, not the moon (obviously). I think someone else mentioned rockets being captured too.
People have also done similar with the moons of other planets. And of course that's how exoplanets have been discovered by looking the effects of a planet crossing between our line of sight of its host star.
FYI some of those amazing shots were also taken by Andrew McCarthy.
https://x.com/AJamesMcCarthy/status/1611128761776492544/
https://x.com/AJamesMcCarthy/status/1479541092693381120/
https://www.planetary.org/space-images/the-iss-and-the-moon
https://spaceflightnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Statio...
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/spectacular-image-sho...
Just so we don't all think one person is the only one to do this
I mean kinda? This thread is about a skydiver. That's a lot less consistent than the orbit of the ISS or some other satellite.
It's also staged. They did it in multiple takes, and then composited out one of the takes with a mosaic of the clean sun. None of the others are composites, and none of the others got multiple takes
Source for it being a composite? The article says under the headline
> This is not photoshopped. That’s really a person falling in front of the Sun.
I haven't watched all the videos. From the Reddit thread, it sounds like it was photoshopped (using that as a generic term for photo editing with a computer) but in a way acceptable to the astrophotography community. I don't understand where those limits are: somewhere strictly between cropping the photo and photographing the skydiver in front of a white screen before pasting the silhouette into a picture of the sun.
From within this own topic, there are clues:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45951713
Sure, all of the elements were captured, but not in a single image released as the final image. If you look at a search for “solar transit”, none of them have as much detail in the sun as this one. That’s evidence of comping the sky diver onto his mosaic. It’s similar to when people come in a full moon over itself when captured in a wide angle image. Yes, the moon was there and it is just updated with something with more detail and better exposure, but it’s not a single image possible to capture without comping. Maybe it’s not as obvious to someone less familiar with astrophotography, but that just makes the sin that much worse.
At the end of the day, it’s a great artistic shot, but it nothing more than the same level of effort to make a modern Marvel movie
That lost shot (Falcon 9 transiting the sun) is my favorite. I've got a print of it in my office, waiting to be hung on the wall.
What a fantastic little story ha I love this. I need to get back out and do some astrophotography myself… not that I’m nearly as good as either of you (even 7 years ago lol)
indeed!
> The silhouette of Brown is neatly demarcated against the bubbling surface of the Sun. His downward trajectory is perfectly framed between sunspots, active regions on the surface of the Sun that are slightly cooler than their surrounding areas. This is not just a pretty picture; it is truly a masterpiece
Excuse me while I go wash off the stench of AI-generated descriptions. The picture is very nice, though.
it's from iflscience which I would be shocked if there were more than 10 humans working for that site. it is so heavily loaded with ads/tracking that it gives no indication of giving a shit about its readers. i saw several parts of the site not loading due to uBO. just to see what was missing, i disabled uBO and after refreshing was presented with a blocking popup that says "our site depends heavily on" blah blah with a link to how to disable the blocker for the site. however, that's how i got to the modal was by disabling the blocker. the site was more functional with it enabled.
again, what would one expect from a site that has that feel of doing nothing than hoping to generate a viral headline just to infect those unfortunate to have actually followed the link
> This is not just a ...
Dead giveaway
Kagi just launched an AI flagging feature. This is something HN needs.
I don’t mind AI content. But I’m not going to read it carefully before commenting, and will double check it with real sources before changing my mind about anything.
Speaking of real sources, the photographer discusses how it was taken and and answers questions on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/1ow9mys/the_most...
For us Old fans: <https://old.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/1ow9mys/the_most...>
Has AI content detection become at all competent?
I think we probably need to go the other way, a comment or article needs a ‘faceId’ check before submission to get human stamp.
Of course that brings a whole another set of problems.
That sort of thing is trivial to bypass and is a massive privacy violation.
It's only a massive privacy violation for honest folk!
Fine, I'll just set up a head made by some SFX type that looks real enough for camera work.
“Encryption is easy — authentication is hard.”
From what I have seen, AI can detect AI better than humans. Humans are bringing baggage into it and vilifying legit writing techniques just because AI uses them. The whole concept that AI was trained on human writing, therefore uses well-known and proven writing techniques, but that those techniques are not exclusive to AI is utterly lost on some people.
The "dead giveaways" are not writing patterns, it is depth. AI will stay at a surface level when using argumentative writing patterns, whereas humans will add supporting information and connect the dots across sentences and paragraphs. It is the lack of connective language between thoughts and phrases that flag an AI.
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HN can't even get it's web front end out of the 90s or meet basic accessibility standards.
*its
And yet, HN is one of the few sites that works (near-)perfectly in Lynx.
AI-diom (n.) - an idiom which, while not exclusive to AI, is so frequent in AI output as to strongly suggest its use
I prefer ‘clankerism’
Let’s bump up the AI even more, instead of “dead giveaway” you should have used hence.
Who cares?
It’s a very cool picture. Andrew McCarthy sells prints of these and other astrophotography on his website[0] although they’re always limited run prints. I bought the one of the sun with a SpaceX rocket for a friend who is into astronomy.
As a sales strategy, making his photos limited edition is a fantastic way to put the pressure on to actually buy instead of thinking about making a purchase indefinitely, even if from a convenience standpoint it’s a little annoying. Looks like right now the 16”x20” edition is sold out, but other sizes are still available for about two days.
I get the whole scarcity thing -- and I've even asked Andrew about this -- because if I'm willing to give him my money after saving up for it, but it sells out first, wouldn't he make more money if he took mine then?
But, I guess we just have to have an art budget with some money already set aside if we want to jump on opportunities when artists do this. I respect it, but yes it's a bit inconvenient.
PS. The full, uncropped shot is even more incredible IMO: https://cosmicbackground.io/cdn/shop/files/Overhead_black_li...
>wouldn't he make more money if he took mine then?
Marketing is far more complex then you're giving it credit for. Take the Factorio game, they don't have sales ever so the best time to buy the game is now. This both keeps people that buy things on sale even if they don't like it from getting it, and keeps other people that may wait for a sale and forget about it from not buying it now.
The same is true for limited numbers. Some people may want it and put it in the cart, but never actually buy it because there is no strong binary motivator. This motivator can actually increase sales quickly and ensure you dont hold inventory for long periods of time.
Also things are commonly bought in batches to reduce price. Your one painting later could either be much more expensive or require the artist to buy 50/100 units at once that risk becoming stuck inventory.
> because if I'm willing to give him my money after saving up for it, but it sells out first, wouldn't he make more money if he took mine then?
If the piece sold out, he made his money.
If I were him I would put out a limited edition at a fixed price like he currently does, but then add $X0? $X00? cumulatively to the price of each additional unit sold.
Peter Lik has a strategy sort of like this. It's still a limited edition of, say, 100, but the price increases as the edition sells out. The last print to sell may be 100x or more the first.
You can't directly compare the two scenarios. Without the incentive to buy due to limited availability, he might have never sold as many copies, or at least it might have taken much longer.
Just print it and glue stick it to your wall
It's the same situation with $1000 theater tickets. You aren't the market.
> making his photos limited edition is a fantastic weay to put the pressure on to actually buy
FWIW, limited edition printing is absolutely standard practice for working artists who use media that can be easily or mechanically replicated, including photographers, printers, and digital artists.
The feeling of FOMO that it instills is indeed one reason, that benefits the artist, but the main reason limited editions are used is to add value to the art through scarcity, and this reason benefits you the buyer. People don’t want to be the first to find and buy something unique only to have it get so popular that all your friends and neighbors go buy the same thing, right?
The story of uniqueness is important. There’s a very real perception that art that can be reproduced indefinitely and is always available is cheap and not really fine art. Limited editions prints are trying, even if half-heartedly, to compete with painters and sculptors who produce something unique every single time. I say half-heartedly as a digital artist who prints limited editions, not as an insult. There is a slight degree of having cake and eating too. Limited editions are usually sized near the estimated sales limit, or such that the artist can move on to selling other work without feeling like they lost a big opportunity.
Limited edition print runs do lower the price of a print, but not as low as the cost of printing. If an artist does editions of size 1, they need to make enough money to live, and $90/print won’t do it if you only sell one. You can spread the profit across a run and give a group of people something for a low price instead of giving one person a high price.
If there's any difference between printmaking and photography, it's that printmaking requires one to physically print each item. There's a non-trivial amount of manual setup to do, and the process can take days.
Photography can be printed basically on-demand owing to the nature of the medium.
It doesn't mean that limited runs in photography are less valid, though. Once that print is editioned no reputable artist will just print more. (although there are ways around it, like different colorways) It definitely makes the item more "collectible".
Oh definitely, I agree, woodcut and digital art and photos, for example, are all wildly different media. I’d expect a woodcut to cost more than a photo, all else being equal, because it’s more physical - both making the plate, and setting up the print run - and generally closer to fine art.
The economics of the limited edition part is still the same for printmaking though, right? The printmaker could choose to make a single print and then sell the plate, or destroy the plate, and it would be closer to sculpture - a one of a kind piece of art. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are one or two printmakers that do this and can sell a single print at a time for enough money to make a living. But I think it’s more common to do a limited edition run and sell multiple copies, same as photographers, no?
A lot of modern prints aren't really made like that. They're just run off on (basically) nice commercial inkjets.
Sure that's not exactly fine art, but there's a big market for it, including things like collectors. Virtually all concert posters are printed this way, for instance.
> You can spread the profit across a run and give a group of people something for a low price instead of giving one person a high price.
Why not somewhere in between those options:
For example (made up numbers), sell 100 units at $100 after which the price goes up by $10 for each additional sale. So the 100th unit would be $100, the 101st unit $110, the 200th unit $1100, and so on.
That’s an interesting concept. Can you talk more about how you imagine that affecting the market? My first reaction is that it wouldn’t solve the value problem at all. Yes you can charge more over time, and in practice it would actually limit how many you sell, but the problem is that the first buyer has no guarantee that the thing they buy is collectible, and thus a reduced incentive to buy. Every new sale devalues the original sale, even despite the low initial price. That might be offset by having lower prices for earlier buyers, but not limiting the edition size might also quietly eliminate the market for collectors.
Your idea reminded me of something I’ve thought about trying. It’s not the same concept exactly, but I do digital art sometimes and I was thinking of selling it with copyrights and the generator program included, and allowing the buyer to do whatever they want with it, including sell copies. The thing I was thinking is that I’d start with a low price per piece, and increase the price slightly every time I sell one, so the prices of my pieces would ramp up over time, rather than the prices of prints in a single edition.
Is the full-sun photo edited to remove the paramotor? I just realized it was in the video shot - the head-down dive “tracking” position of the skydiver in the video happens only a few frames after jumping, only for a few frames, and after that he’s tumbling a bit against the sun, with the paramotor still visible. I’m guessing even if the video and still were two different cameras, they wouldn’t have been far enough apart to catch the skydiver without the paramotor?
In the behind the scenes video the photographer makes an offhand comment that yes, he was going to take the silhouette of the skydiver (and maybe some of the immediate surroundings) and composite it with a mosaic of sun images taken around the same time (but without the paramotor present).
I recall one of their earlier composites of the sun which was comprised of 90k (!) images and feel that's an acceptable approach to represent the detail and scope desired, yet with this skydiver shot I feel differently in that there is an original shot of the event that is an actual through-the-lens capture but it's not being used and instead the foreground element (the silhouette) is being masked and composited onto a much more detailed composite sun. It's effectively artwork now.
Like if a photo of Philippe Petit's WTC wire walking were instead masked and replaced with separately shot towers—it'd represent the event but technically not the actual snapshot in time it occurred, which kind of reduces the connection with the interesting concept at least for me.
Apparently it took multiple tries to get this right. It is possible that the video is from one of the earlier failed attempts.
On a Reddit thread somewhere, the OP mentioned the sun is taken as a mosaic, where the picture taken with just the person is a very small FOV which excludes the paramotor.
Watching the video, the difference between the actual frame captured and the manipulated stacked image that's being presented is quite stark.
Better post IMO: https://petapixel.com/2025/11/14/sun-skydiver-photo-andrew-m...
Related. Others?
I captured my friend transiting the sun during a skydive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45919692 - Nov 2025 (12 comments)
Be great to have the same shot but in front of the moon. Photos would make a stunning pair!
I think the same photographers ISS passing infront of the Sun and moon are more impressive:
https://www.demilked.com/iss-in-front-of-sun-and-moon-andrew...
Perhaps just me still carrying some latent trauma, but the upside down, legs bent moment reminded me of a picture from 9/11. Not going to link to it.
Tbh, do not quite get the excitement around this picture. It was staged, and the stunt doesn’t appear to be particularly complex. A lot of logistics, sure. But seems like all there is to it is that someone just bothered to do it. So not clear what’s the additional value over photoshop.
> So not clear what’s the additional value over photoshop.
I think photography might just not be for you (nothing wrong with that)
I like photography doubly so as a craft, and forgive me if a heavily shopped stacked comp isn't making my heart quicken.
Care to explain? I actually do take pictures with a camera from time to time.
Again, this was staged. Also, when Tom Cruise performed his own stunts in Mission Impossible, that value I can understand. That is better than photoshop. Because they were hard stunts. This on the other hand seems to be standard.
The difference is THEY DID IT.
Photoshop is not real.
This was real.
This was recorded.
The value is in the authenticity and execution of a cool idea no one else has done before.
Try to reproduce it yourself, bro.
A lot of logistics, as mentioned. If you’d like to explain what’s in there beyond that, I’ll be glad to hear.
the novelty, you didn't do or think of that before. It was well executed and novelty.
You can't do it, you also didn't think of it before.
What value are you adding?
This isn't about me though, no point in making this personal. I'm just trying to understand what's interesting about this picture. You are saying that just because nobody took that particular combination before, it is enough of a reason, right?
I’m get a box right away asking me to turn off my ad blocker. I’m not running an ad blocker…
same :(
Very unique and cool image.
I was curious at first if this was planned, or if it was a bizzare coincidence… I’m not sure whether to be enthralled or disappointed. On one side is the wonderful creation of chaos, on the other is a marvel of photographic engineering.
Am I right in thinking he flew up there in a paramotor and then jumped off it? What happened to the paramotor? It just crashed in a random place you have no control over?
According to the article there was a pilot in addition to a skydiver.
There’s a video of the jump in the article. You can kinda see the pilot in the paramotor flying away, as the jumper leaves.
"what comes up must come down" -- Icarus
"That's not my department" said Wernher von Braun.
I sort of like it upside down, power of ra.
Great photo for science and art at the same time!
I have to say, well done.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution intensifies
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LOL - the deeper mythological meanings are quite applicable (!)
What meanings, a reader might ask? First to say, art and mythos can have layers of meanings..There is no "right answer" exactly. think for yourself a moment about "falling" "The Sun", "a son", endeavor, catastrophe, and add knowledge or fate as you see fit.
