Movie 8 (:50)
Script : To understand
relativistic aberration, consider the ordinary "real"
world. When a vehicle moves through rain, to the vehicle the rain
seems to fall at an angle. In an analogous process, photons "falling"
into the camera appear to come from different angles as the camera
moves at different speeds. As the camera moves faster and faster,
photons enter it at increasingly steeper angles.
This means that
things that would
appear behind us if we were in their rest frame are wrapped forward
into our field of view. The same, reversed, applies to outgoing
photons. This gathering of light into a narrow circle in the direction
of travel creates a headlight effect forward and a dimming effect
behind.