A thin accretion disk around a non-rotating black hole seen nearly edge-on: the far side of the disk is lensed up over the black shadow and a second image wraps beneath it; the left side is brighter and bluer where the gas moves toward the viewer.
Schwarzschild black hole with a thin accretion disk at 80° inclination — Luminet's 1979 configuration — rendered on a Pixel 10 GPU. Colour is the disk's thermal emission after Doppler and gravitational shift (peak temperature 11,000 K, a disclosed presentation choice). The faint vertical line is a seam between render tiles. 8192 px

Eric Gray

Independent researcher.

ORCID 0009-0006-0597-2134

Luminet

A black-hole imaging laboratory built on a phone. Named for Jean-Pierre Luminet's 1979 paper Image of a spherical black hole with thin accretion disk, whose central figure it reproduces. The metrics, geodesics and disk physics were derived from the primary sources; every result was pre-registered before the run that resolved it; the images below were rendered on the Pixel 10's GPU.

Rapidly spinning black hole, disk at 80° inclination; the shadow is flattened on one side by frame dragging.
Kerr, spin a = 0.9, 80° inclination.
Spinning black hole viewed nearly face-on: a bright ring of disk around the shadow.
Kerr, a = 0.9, 20° inclination.
Schwarzschild black hole with disk seen nearly face-on.
Schwarzschild, 10° inclination.
Schwarzschild black hole with disk at 30° inclination.
Schwarzschild, 30°.
Schwarzschild black hole with disk at 50° inclination.
Schwarzschild, 50°.
Schwarzschild black hole with disk at 70° inclination.
Schwarzschild, 70°.
Schwarzschild black hole with disk seen almost exactly edge-on.
Schwarzschild, 85°.
The view from an observer falling toward a Schwarzschild black hole: the shadow fills much of the sky.
Schwarzschild, seen by an infalling observer.