In April, astronomers wowed the world with the first real-life picture of a black hole. But that blurry, still image of the supermassive monster in the galaxy M87 doesn’t really convey just how wildly a black hole’s immense gravity distorts its surroundings. Now, images from computer simulations highlight in more detail how a black hole warps spacetime like a fun house mirror — and how that affects the appearance of its glowing accretion disk of infalling material.