My 90,000 shots of the sun: Andrew McCarthy’s best photograph | Photography

I bought a telescope on a whim in 2017, thinking back fondly to when my dad used to show me Jupiter and Saturn through his. I thought: “Why not revisit some of those memories, now that I can afford to spend a few hundred bucks on essentially a toy?” It was a 10in Dobsonian telescope that I set up in my back yard and pointed towards the brightest things I could see in the sky from the southern horizon – which by sheer luck happened to be Jupiter and Saturn. I was immediately transported back to being a kid, staring at these incredible things. Then I did what any millennial would do: I took out my iPhone and tried to take a photo of what I was seeing through the telescope. It didn’t turn out very good but it made me want to share what I was seeing with the world.

I started to teach myself about astrophotography and what equipment I’d need. My photos got better and better. Then, during the pandemic, I was laid off from a tech startup and couldn’t find a new job. I thought: “What if I try selling the pictures I’m taking through the telescope?” Before I knew it, I had people helping me turn my hobby into a business, and I was learning the skills I’d need to get into more elaborate deep space photography, such as capturing the sun.

The sun’s atmosphere is made up of several layers. The outermost part is called the corona. Beneath that there’s a thin layer of plasma called the chromosphere. The visible “surface” of the sun is called the photosphere, where convection cells the size of Texas rise up and fall back down again through the plasma. This process of convection is so bright it overwhelms everything else. To photograph the sun, you need to block out the photosphere using a precisely tuned telescope. Because the photosphere is so bright, if you use the wrong type, you’ll blind yourself and burn your house down.

This image was created from about 90,000 separate photos, taken with a new telescope I specifically designed for high-resolution solar imagery. It has an effective 4,000mm focal length, which is 10 times the power of my previous telescope. When you look through this telescope you’re only seeing a tiny piece of the sun, so I had to take thousands of photos in quick succession. With the help of another astrophotographer, Jason Guenzel, I used special software to amalgamate them into this single uniquely striking image.

The sun has periods of low and high activity. This in an image of low activity. One thing that really stands out is that if you look at the 1 o’clock position, you can see a giant plasma tornado about 14 Earths tall, which as luck would have it was happening just then.

I’ll happily photograph other things in the sky, from the planets in our solar system to the moon, even satellites and rockets. I recently took my highest ever resolution photo of a comet. I’ve captured nebulas where you can see the births of new stars and solar systems. I’m currently working on a high-resolution photo of the Andromeda galaxy, our neighbouring galaxy. It’s a complicated process that takes hundreds of hours.

When I post my images on Instagram and my webpage they tend to go viral, because I take a unique look at our skies. I’m not a scientist, I’m an artist. I’m trying to show things in a way that makes people stop and say: “Wow, the sun looks really cool here.” What’s exciting isn’t the buzz in the scientific community, it’s the buzz among people who normally don’t pay attention to space or science; who might save my photos as their wallpaper, and look up and think about our place in the cosmos. We need to inspire young minds to think about space, and their role on our planet, and how we may one day venture beyond it.

Andrew McCarthy’s latest calendar can be found at cosmicbackground.io

Andrew McCarthy’s CV