Movie 10 (1:19)

Script : Accelerating, we see the distortion increasing, and the sun and clouds rotating into our field of view. The rectangle in the center of the screen is a computer correction which leaves out Doppler and intensity effects to improve clarity.

To see what is happening all around us, we use a mercator projection; a map of everything we can see around us. The map is made by "unwrapping" a sphere and stretching the areas at the poles to make the map flat. This is the same kind of common map of the Earth that shows Greenland stretched to the size of South America. This kind of map obviously creates distortions of its own which have nothing to do with relativity. But using this view may help you to understand the abberation effects of relativity.

Accelerating, we can see that objects behind us increase in size. Even though we are moving away from the houses at the end of the street, at the left and right edges, the houses grow larger. The patch of blue sky overhead shrinks to a small circle ahead of us. And the clouds and sun rotate into that small circle, appearing distorted but maintaining their positions in the shrunken scene.