The sun seen from a relativistic spaceship moving at 30% of the speed of light. When the spaceship approaches, the sun appears very bright; at the beginning of the movie it is about three times as bright as for an observer at rest. The spaceship passes the sun at a distance of five solar radii from its center. During the fly by, the astronaut first looks towards the front and then turns so that she always keeps the sun in view. At the instant, when the vertical bar passes the center of the image, she looks exactly to the side (i.e. at right angles to the direction of motion).

The same fly by as above, but the images have been edited to suppress the change in brightness in favour of the colour change: Each foreground pixel has been scaled to the same predefined level of brightness.

The sun seen from a relativistic spaceship moving at 90% of the speed of light. The images are adapted in brightness as in the preceding movie. Here, the variation in brightness is too large to be displayed on a monitor: In the first image the sun would have to be 30 million times as bright as in the last.