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A. J. S. Hamilton (JILA & APS, U. Colorado)
Black Hole Flight Simulator
The Black Hole Flight Simulator (BHFS) is interactive software that works in real time either on a PC, or in a multi-processed multi-pipe full dome environment such as the new Gates Planetarium at the Denver Museum for Nature and Science (DMNS). The BHFS is intended to simulate realistic flight around and into black holes, as if one were piloting a spaceship, and features a multitude of special and general relativistic effects, including lensing, redshifting, and time dilation. The BHFS currently incorporates a complete implementation of the Reissner-Nordström geometry of a spherical charged black hole, including its connections inside the horizon to parallel universes, wormholes, white holes, and other universes. The BHFS was developed while the author was on sabbatical with the DMNS in 2001/2, and will be used to generate black hole graphics in a TV show and an associated large format high resolution dome show currently in production in collaboration with Nova-PBS and the DMNS, for launch in 2005, the centenary of Einstein's annus mirabilis.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 #2
© YEAR. The American Astronomical Soceity.