Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar
Kip Thorne submitted this paper to the Cornell University Library at arXiv.org concerning the work on Interstellar.
Just an acknowledgement for contribution to the project, nice to contributing to science though, especially the field of astrophysics.
This is what the paper is about :
This paper has four purposes: (i) To describe DNGR for physicists and CGI practitioners . (ii) To present the equations we use, when the camera is in arbitrary motion at an arbitrary location near a Kerr black hole, for mapping light sources to camera images via elliptical ray bundles. (iii) To describe new insights, from DNGR, into gravitational lensing when the camera is near the spinning black hole, rather than far away as in almost all prior studies. (iv) To describe how the images of the black hole Gargantua and its accretion disk, in the movie \emph{Interstellar}, were generated with DNGR. There are no new astrophysical insights in this accretion-disk section of the paper, but disk novices may find it pedagogically interesting, and movie buffs may find its discussions of Interstellar interesting.