How a Global Network of Telescopes Captured the First Black Hole Image

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is an international collaboration aiming to capture the first image of a black hole by creating a virtual Earth-sized telescope. This short animated movie explains some of the nuts and bolts behind this ambitious endeavour. Collage of video footage from eight observatories and two data centers that participated in the acquisition and initial processing (correlation) of Event Horizon Telescope data in 2017. Animation zooming into M87 to show its accretion disk, ray-traced images and blurring due to instrument noise, demonstrating how the image obtained with the Event Horizon Telescope fit into a bigger picture.

Production credit: NSF

Observatories:
1) Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), Cerro Chajnantor, Chile
Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)
2) Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), Cerro Chajnantor, Chile
Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)
3) IRAM 30-meter Telescope (IRAM), Pico Veleta, Spain
Credit: Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique (IRAM)
4) James Clark Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), Maunakea, Hawaii, USA
Credit: East Asian Observatory/William Montgomerie, JCMT
5) Large Millimeter Telescope "Alfonso Serrano" (LMT), Sierra Negra, Mexico
Credit: INAOE Archives, LMT
6) South Pole Telescope (SPT), South Pole Station, Antarctica
Credit: Junham Kim (University of Arizona), Robert Schwarz
7) Submillimeter Array (SMA), Maunakea, Hawaii, USA
Credit: Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithosonian
8) Submillimeter Telescope (SMT), Mount Graham, Arizona, USA
Credit: Bob Demers (University of Arizona), ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

Data Centers:
1) Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy, Bonn, Germany
Credit: Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, Helge Rottmann, Efthalia Traianou
2) MIT Haystack Observatory, Westford, Massachusetts, USA
Credit: Bryce Vickmark , MIT Haystack Observatory

To learn more, visit the official EHT website, https://eventhorizontelescope.org. You can also find the EHT on Twitter -- https://twitter.com/ehtelescope -- and on Facebook -- https://www.facebook.com/ehtelescope !

Credits:
Animation: Chris Jones (https://www.chrisjonesanimation.com/)
Screenplay: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/sao/)
Narration: Alex Hanson (https://alexhanson13.wordpress.com/)
Funded by: National Science Foundation (https://www.nsf.gov/)

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