Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Black hole lensing

Black hole lensing

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 23 Nov 2010 at 21:06:12 (UTC)

Original - Lensing by a black hole. Animated simulation of gravitational lensing caused by a Schwarzschild black hole going past a background galaxy. A secondary image of the galaxy can be seen within the black hole Einstein ring on the opposite direction of that of the galaxy. The secondary image grows (remaining within the Einstein ring) as the primary image approaches the black hole. The surface brightness of the two images remain constant, but their angular size vary, hence producing an amplification of the galaxy luminosity as seen from a distant observer. The maximum amplification occurs when the background galaxy (or in the present case a bright part of it) is exactly behind the black hole.

Alt (very large size gif; 12 MB)

Reason

good EV; informative about gravitational lensing and black holes; decent quality for an animation

Articles in which this image appears

Black hole, Gravitational lens

FP category for this image

Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Space/Astronomy

Creator

Urbane Legend

• Support as nominator --Nergaal (talk) 21:06, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
• Comment Perhaps this would be better if the background object was something other than a line (effectively). As is I couldn't tell if the lens flips things on an axis or not for example. Noodle snacks (talk) 06:44, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
  • I also think this could be better if it was rendered in (say) 1080p and uploaded as video, rather than animated gif. Noodle snacks (talk) 06:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
    • I also think this would be better as a video, the animated gif is just way to small, so I Oppose on size grounds. The first is too small the second forces the reader to download a 12 meg file to view the animation, which is prohibitive for many of the readership, not everyone has broadband. Plus my fairly new laptop visibly lags for several seconds to render that image, animated gifs are not meant to replace video codecs. — raekyt 16:33, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose due to format issues as per above. The 12 mb "very large size" is large only in filesize, whilst the image resolution is extremely low. Furthermore, due to the nature of GIF images having a small colour palette, there is a significant and annoying amount of dithering. This should be in a true video format.Purpy Pupple (talk) 21:05, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Not Promoted --Makeemlighter (talk) 04:18, 24 November 2010 (UTC)