How do you take a picture of something defined by the fact that light cannot escape it? This episode follows the long road to imaging Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. We start with Karl Jansky's accidental 1933 detection of radio static from the direction of Sagittarius while investigating interference for Bell Labs, then move through the 1974 interferometer work of Bruce Balick and Robert Brown, the origin of the asterisk in the name, and the 1994 velocity measurements that pointed to millions of solar masses packed into a tiny volume.

We then explain how the Event Horizon Telescope used aperture synthesis to link dishes across the planet, why the 2022 image of our own black hole took years longer to produce than the 2019 image of M87*, and what the S-stars orbiting the galactic center reveal. We  ...