No video. No model. Every frame, this page fires a photon through curved spacetime for each pixel on your screen — and lets gravity decide where it lands.
That razor-thin ring of fire is light that looped the hole one or more times before flying to your eye. Nothing about it is a texture — it is the actual path of photons, bent by gravity, step by step on the GPU.
The disk is flat. You see it arcing above and below the hole because spacetime bends the light from its far side up and over the horizon. One side burns brighter — matter racing toward you is Doppler-beamed.
Every background star behind the hole is smeared into an Einstein ring. Drag to orbit and watch the whole starfield slide and warp as your line of sight threads the curved space around the mass.
Inside the horizon, every photon path ends at the singularity — so the center returns pure black. Keep scrolling and the camera falls inward; there is no coming back out.
Each fragment marches a photon and bends its velocity toward the singularity with an inverse-square pull every step.
Bent rays cross the equatorial plane two or three times, so a flat disk reads as a halo arcing over the hole.
Plasma rotating toward the camera is brightened; the approaching edge of the disk glows hotter and whiter.
The background is sampled by the photon's final direction, so stars smear into an Einstein ring around the shadow.
Disk temperature drives a cool-to-hot ramp, tonemapped with an ACES filmic curve for that cinematic core.
A single fullscreen plane, one ShaderMaterial, no post-processing dependency. Honors reduced motion.