Cool, now I have an intuition for how a black hole distorts lines of sight. Basically it's like a black ball hanging in space, with a "halo" that shows you a di

Cool, now I have an intuition for how a black hole distorts lines of sight. Basically it's like a black ball hanging in space, with a "halo" that shows you a distorted image of everything that's behind the ball. For example, if there's a hula hoop around the ball, the near side of the hoop will look more or less normal to you, but the far side will look like it's warped, like it's refusing to go around the ball and instead shows up above or below it (or both). And the innermost part of the halo shows infinitely many images of the hoop (and everything else around the ball), stretched thinner and thinner.