The sun.
We take for granted that it appears in the east, chases away the darkness, and then traverses the sky before setting (sometimes in immense, colorful glory) in the western sky.
As a photographer, most of my photographs use illumination from this original, all-natural light source.
Yet, as the lunar eclipse in the spring of 2024 taught us, the sun is also a powerful entity more than 90 million miles away from our planet. We were told not to look directly at the sun. If you wanted to photograph the eclipse, you needed a special filter over your lens, or you would damage the camera sensor.
Photographer Andrew McCarthy has taken tens of thousands of sun photographs through his telescope and produced one of the most compelling images of our sun I have ever seen—combining around 90,000 separate images into the one featured in this post.
The Guardian, a British newspaper, published a short interview with McCarthy, which is worth the read.
I have tried astrophotography a few times with minimal success. I am inspired to try it with the combination of clear skies and a meteor shower.
