How to Understand the Image of a Black Hole

We have just seen the first image of a black hole, the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun. But what is that image really showing us? This is an awesome paper on the topic by J.P. Luminet: Image of a spherical black hole with thin accretion disk Astronomy and Astrophysics, vol. 75, no. 1-2, May 1979, p. 228-235 Using my every day intuition I wondered: will we see the “shadow“ of the black hole even if we’re looking edge on at the