My Ninety Thousand Shots of the Sun: Andrew McCarthy and His Best Picture

Rich Pelley in conversation with photographer Andrew McCarthy / The Guardian

Translation: Telegrafi.com

In 2017, I suddenly bought a telescope, nostalgically remembering the times when my father would show me Jupiter and Saturn through his telescope. I thought, "Why not bring back those memories, now that I can spend a few hundred dollars on such a toy"? It was a Dobsonian telescope that I set up in the backyard and pointed it at the brightest things I could see in the sky from the southern horizon – and as luck would have it, it was Jupiter and Saturn. Seeing these extraordinary things, I immediately felt like I was back in my childhood. Then I did what any millennial would do: I checked out iPhoneand tried to take a picture of what I was seeing through the telescope. It didn't turn out very well, but it made me want to share what I was seeing with the world.

I started teaching myself about astrophotography and what equipment I would need. My photos got better and better. Then, during the pandemic, I lost my job at a tech startup and couldn't find a new job. I thought, "What if I try to sell the pictures I'm taking through the telescope"? Before I knew it, I had people helping me turn this hobby into a business, so I was developing the skills I needed to get into more advanced deep space photography – like photographing the Sun.

The Sun's atmosphere consists of several layers. The outermost part is called the corona. Below it is a thin layer of plasma called the chromosphere. The visible "surface" of the sun is called the photosphere, where Texas-sized convection cells rise and fall through the plasma. This convection process is so bright that it dominates everything else. To photograph the Sun, you must block the photosphere using a precisely adjusted telescope. Because the photosphere is so bright, using the wrong type of telescope can blind you or burn the house down.

This image was created from about 90 separate photos taken with a new telescope that I designed specifically for high-resolution imaging of the Sun. It has an effective focal length of four thousand millimeters, which is ten times more powerful than my previous telescope. When you look through this telescope, you only see a very small part of the Sun, so I had to take thousands of pictures at high speed. With the help of another astrophotographer, Jason Guenzel, I used special software to compile these photos into this unique and impressive image.

The sun has periods of low and high activity. This is a low activity image. One thing that really stands out is a giant plasma tornado about 14 times the height of Earth, which was located at the one o'clock position and happened just as I was photographing.

I also enjoy photographing other things in the Sky, from the planets of our solar system to the Moon, even satellites and comets. Recently, I took my highest resolution picture of a comet. I captured nebulae where you can see the births of stars and new solar systems. I am currently working on a high-resolution photo of the Andromeda galaxy, our neighboring galaxy. It's a complicated process that takes hundreds of hours.

When I post my images on Instagram and on my website, they often go viral because I provide a unique view of our Sky. I'm not a scientist, I'm an artist. I try to show things in a way that makes people stop and say, "Wow, the Sun really looks amazing here." What's exciting is not so much the interest in the scientific community, but the buzz among people who don't usually pay attention to space or science; those who can save my photos as wallpaper on their computer and look up, thinking about our place in the cosmos. We need to inspire young minds to think about space, their role on our planet and how we can one day go beyond it. /Telegraph/