Comment by dmurray
12 hours ago
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