Visualization of the General Relativistic Rigidly Ro- tating Disk of Dust

In this paper the visualization of the rigidly rotating disk of dust is investigated. The visual appearance of the disk as seen by a realistic observer is calculated using the null geodesics of the photons which are emitted by the disk and registered by the observer. This visualization technique is ray tracing in four-dimensional curved spacetime. We create images with a wide range of parameters varying both the position of the observer and the physical properties of the disk in order to obtain interpretations of the basic visual effects. For sufficiently relativistic disks, multiple and distorted imagesappear. For even more rela- tivistic disks, fractal structures within the image plane occur since neighboring image points correspond to distant points on the disk.