Special Seminar in CMS

This talk will present the methods and procedures used to produce the first results from the Event Horizon Telescope. It is theorized that a black hole will leave a "shadow" on a background of hot gas. Taking a picture of this black hole shadow could help to address a number of important scientific questions, both on the nature of black holes and the validity of general relativity. Unfortunately, due to its small size, traditional imaging approaches require an Earth-sized radio telescope. In this talk, I discuss techniques we have developed to photograph a black hole using the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of telescopes scattered across the globe. Imaging a black hole's structure with this computational telescope requires us to reconstruct images from sparse measurements, heavily corrupted by atmospheric error.