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

‘I took all the images with a precisely tuned telescope then joined them up. Use the wrong type of telescope and you’ll blind yourself and burn your house down’

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.