Black Hole Image on a Budget

By Alan Wong (April 10, 2019)

In this tutorial, we will generate an image of a black hole for a fraction of the budget of top world scientists. You don't even need a telescope for this; just go install GIMP for free! You can find lots of pictures of black holes online (e.g. from NASA). Some are real... others are not, like the ones we will make here.

Space

Let's begin with dark space. Create an image with a single layer.

Figure 1: Hello Darkness

Figure 1: Hello Darkness

Reddish blob

On a new layer, use the paint brush or the ink tool to make a reddish blob. Just get an overall shape you like. This is not an exact science! Here, I just "eye-balled" a color I liked. Alternatively, you could pull up an official black hole image and use the color picker tool to get a closer fit.

Figure 2: Starting with a Reddish Blob

Figure 2: Starting with a Reddish Blob

I then applied a Gaussian Blur (radius 100px on a 640x480 px image) to my reddish blob. I adjusted the opacity of the layer to get values closer to what I liked.

Figure 3: Bluring the Reddish Blob

Figure 3: Bluring the Reddish Blob

Donut thing part 1

Next, I added an orange donut thing with the paint brush or ink tool like we just did with the reddish blob. I did this on a new (transparent) layer.

Figure 4: Drawing a Donut

Figure 4: Drawing a Donut

I then applied a Gaussian Blur, as before with the reddish block (radius 75px).

Figure 5: Blurred Donut

Figure 5: Blurred Donut

Smiley event horizon

At this point, we're at the final stage of our scientific graphic production. I repeated the same procedure of adding layers, painting, and blurring.

Figure 6: Egg Yoke Looking Thing

Figure 6: Egg Yoke Looking Thing

You can experiment with blur radius values to find what looks right to you.

Figure 7: Blurred Egg Yoke Thing

Figure 7: Blurred Egg Yoke Thing

Finally, I added some final sparkly highlights...

Figure 8: Highlights

Figure 8: Highlights

Things here are of course very fuzzy. You can play around with your layers (opacity values, etc.) until you get a result you like. Behold, a black hole!

Figure 9: Finished

Figure 9: Finished

You can use your new black hole image(s) in applications like this curiosity driven graphic:

Figure 10: Important Questions

Figure 10: Important Questions

I generated an HTML document for this document using pandoc and this CSS sheet by killercup (with a couple small modifications).

pandoc README.md -c pandoc.css -so index.html