Southern Arizona astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy captured a once-in-a-blue-moon image on Wednesday night, and his luck didn’t stop there.
Early on, it looked like bad weather might keep him from photographing the rare blue supermoon, but the clouds above his home in Florence parted just in time for him to train his various cameras on the closest and brightest lunar display of the year.
Then, a jetliner flew through the frame, silhouetting itself perfectly against the glowing disc of the moon.
The next morning, McCarthy posted the stunning image on X. the social media site formerly known as Twitter, along with this: “Capturing the plane was a complete accident, but worked out nicely in the composition so I left it in. I wonder if I can track down the pilot(s) and let them know I got a photo of them?”
By that afternoon, he not only knew the aircraft’s flight number and destination, but he had already received a glowing review of his work from one of the people who was at the controls that night.
“I love the power of the internet,” McCarthy wrote to his more than 255,000 followers on social media on Thursday. “I take a photo of the silhouette of some strangers many miles away and within 24 hours I’m able to show them the photo.”
Southern Arizona astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy poses with one of his telescopes.
He almost didn’t get the shot at all. “I was getting rained on while I was shooting the pictures,” he said.
The photo he posted is actually a composite of roughly 30,000 separate images, most of them detail shots of small areas of the moon that are then “stacked” to filter out the distortion caused by Earth’s atmosphere.
He was shooting using three telescopes and two cameras, at least one of which was firing away just as JetBlue Flight 30 soared overhead on its way from San Diego to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The entire aircraft only shows up in a single frame, McCarthy said.
“That was very surprising to me. This was just luck,” he said.
After he posted the finished photo online, the popular air traffic website Flightradar24 replied with an offer to help him track down which flight it was.
A few hours later, Aroldo Vichiett Netto, the first officer from Flight 30, posted a message for the photographer: “Awesome shot! I just signed up an account here to thank you for the picture.”
Southern Arizona astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy connected on the social media site X with one of the pilots of a JetBlue flight that flew through past his cameras while he was photographing Wednesday's rare blue supermoon.
McCarthy said he wasn’t originally planning to offer prints of the zoomed-in version of the JetBlue blue moon he posted online, but he might have to make an exception for Netto and his fellow crew members.
“It’s a wholesome little story,” he said.
McCarthy started photographing the night sky after buying his first telescope in 2017. What started as a hobby soon grew into a habit and then into a career. He now supports himself by selling prints of his space photos.
His meticulously planned and executed work has earned him a large following and some worldwide media attention, especially his ultra-detailed images of the moon and the sun, occasionally with the International Space Station crossing in front of them.
McCarthy said he moved to Florence two years ago and built an observatory in his backyard to take advantage of the area’s dark, mostly clear skies and its distance from the usual flow of the jet stream, which can increase the amount of atmospheric “noise” he’s trying to keep out of his pictures.
Wednesday’s moon was especially bright once it came out from behind the clouds. “It was casting bright, crisp shadows,” McCarthy said.
Despite its colorful name, a blue moon isn’t any more blue than usual. That’s just what people call “extra” full moons — like the second one in a single month or the fifth one in a single season — that land on the calendar every 2½ years or so.
The blue moon on Aug. 30 was especially rare, not to mention large and bright, because it happened during perigee, the nearest point to Earth in the moon’s orbit. The last blue supermoon like that occurred in December 2009, and the next won’t happen until August 2032.
A United Airlines flight crosses in front of the sun in a 2020 image by Southern Arizona astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy.
This wasn’t the first time McCarthy has connected with someone after they literally flew past his lens. Back in 2020, a photo he took of a United Airlines jet crossing in front of the sun went viral, and he soon found himself sending out prints of the image to everyone working on the flight that day.
McCarthy still hears from at least one person connected to that shot any time it circulates online, he said. “Every time I repost it, the pilot’s son chimes in with, ‘That’s a picture of my dad!’”
