alt Hacker NewsOne side of the accretion disk is indeed brighter than the other – in the default view in the app, the bottom part is brighter. The effect appears quite clearly visible to me, although the exact contrast depends on the colorscale mapping. Here, I tried to find a colorscale that works well for both the disk and the jet, which naturally means the leading/trailing edge contrast can be less than in the linear mapping. Hope it explains the visual effect!
Kerr vs Schwarzschild (static vs rotating black holes) is a much smaller effect visually – that's why it is so hard for us to measure black hole spins (= how fast they are rotating) observationally, even with the Event Horizon Telescope.
I think the contrast between the two sides is typically greater with an optically thick disk, and it looks like you are rendering an optically thin disk. I think that's the main difference from what I was expecting when I saw it.
Very cool demo! Thanks for sharing!
(For reference, my experience rendering black holes is recreating Luminet's rendering from the late 70s: https://www.ioccc.org/2025/cesmoak/index.html )