Why did the Event Horizon Telescope take so long to take a photo of a black hole? The Event Horizon Telescope is in the news now because they are about to release the first ever picture of a black hole. They have been working on this since 2006. Why did it take 13 years to produce the first picture? What was the critical mass that was recently hit that made the picture now complete?
A single telescope does not have the right angle size to picture the black hole that far away. The scientists had to use 8 telescopes to take a picture of the same point in the sky and merge the data from all sites using super computer. The data retrieval must point to the same object at the same time. Given the diverse condition of the 8 locations, there are only 5 days in a year when all of them have clear enough skies to point to the same location in a year.

Event Horizon Telescope