Celestia Forums

I have just made a black hole...... It's alot simpler then most people think all you really need to do is this, make another small moon around the earth, with a VERY tight orbit then make a pure black texture, turn on all the stars (looks best if the stars are points)..... and then you go a black hole ohhhhhh and if you use the gravity mod posted here then increase the gravity to 100e5 you can be pretty much anywhere within 1 AU and still get sucked it give it a try one day

I still kinda wish that I could make a light distortion to go along with it buuuttttt oh welll.....or mabye I can!!!! USE AN ATMOSPHERE!!!!!! that'll work I will post a picture If I can figure out how to!

Here are some nice animations:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/htmltest/gifcity/circbh.mpg

http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/schw.shtml

or if you care for some deeper insight, I can recommend to you the interesting homepage of a very famous colleague of mine (Nobel Prize '99, no kidding):
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/

I have recovered now the URL of a very interesting site containing animations and illustrations about visible light distortions that occur when one is approaching a black hole, a neutron star or an ultra compact star. Also, there are
are animations (mpg) displaying the views when one encircles a black hole at the photon sphere etc.

Have a look:

http://www.phy.mtu.edu/bht/rjn_bht.html

I have all these mpg's since some time, but it took a little while before I found the URL again.

It could be an inspiring start for incorporating such effects into Celestia;-)

Bye Fridger

I have recovered now the URL of a very interesting site containing animations and illustrations about visible light distortions that occur when one is approaching a black hole, a neutron star or an ultra compact star. Also, there are
are animations (mpg) displaying the views when one encircles a black hole at the photon sphere etc.

Have a look:

http://www.phy.mtu.edu/bht/rjn_bht.html

I have all these mpg's since some time, but it took a little while before I found the URL again.

It could be an inspiring start for incorporating such effects into Celestia;-)

Bye Fridger

Wow,that's some.......deep stuff. And how is Celestia supposed to use this info?

That first animation fridger should be the way chris renders black holes...I like the way it distorts the backscene...giving the apearence of a 'hole' in space

Rassilon wrote:That first animation fridger should be the way chris renders black holes...I like the way it distorts the backscene...giving the apearence of a 'hole' in space

I agree. That would be a very cool effect, if he can produce the proper equations and integrate them into Celestia. Chris, when do you thing black holes will be ready for Celestia?

My hunch is that gravitational lensing would be a very difficult thing for Celestia since it doesn't really fit into a standard 3D imaging model. You'd probably need something more like a ray tracer, which is not how Celestia works (and would be relatively slow).

It would be hard enough work just to model things like the aberration and Doppler shift of starlight from high-speed travel, or finite light-speed delays. Those could at least be faked to some degree by messing with the positions and possibly the meshes of objects. With gravitational lensing it would be much harder since you can have multiple images of the same object, and really complicated funhouse-mirror distortions.

By the way, while when Nemiroff made those animations it seemed unclear that such a thing as his "ultracompact star" could really exist, it now seems more likely that such things really do exist. They might not be neutron stars, but rather some more exotic form of matter such as strange quark matter.