Black Hole Wallpaper

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A live desktop wallpaper for macOS: a spinning black hole with real gravitational light bending, colored nebulae and a glowing band along the menu bar and the Dock. It also ships as a screen saver.

What is real and what is not

• Real: Every pixel follows a light ray through the spacetime of a spinning black hole (Kerr metric, Hamilton's equations, RK4). That gives the shadow, the photon ring, the bent image of the far side of the disk and the stretched stars near the Einstein ring. The disk starts at the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) and turns at Kepler speeds. The side moving toward you is brighter and bluer (Doppler shift and gravitational redshift).
• Artistic: the colors. A real disk would look white to orange.

Features

• 7 presets: Swirl, Gargantua, M87* as photographed, Top View, Ice Blue, Star System and Sci-Fi Harbor. Duplicate any of them and change every value.
• Per-monitor presets: each display can show its own preset and its own position of the hole.
• Animation levels: All, Edges Only and Off. With Edges Only the hole stands still and only the bands at the menu bar and the Dock move. On a MacBook Air M4 at 3440 x 1440 that cuts GPU time from about 2 ms to about 0.13 ms per frame.
• Objects around the hole: galaxies, distant and nearby stars, planets, moons, asteroids and belts, comets, meteors, a second black hole, a wormhole and a relativistic jet. A galaxy right behind the hole turns into an Einstein ring.
• Ships and stations from many sci-fi worlds: Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Raumpatrouille Orion, The Expanse, Babylon 5, Firefly, 2001, Interstellar, Mass Effect and others, plus real spacecraft such as Hubble, James Webb and the ISS. Ships jump in and out with warp, hyperspace and similar events.
• Realistic motion: bodies follow Kepler orbits, fly-bys run on hyperbolas that the hole deflects, tides stretch bodies close to the hole, and a second hole orbits with the sum of both masses.
• Quality levels: Battery Saver, Balanced, High and Ultra, set separately for power adapter and battery. The default is High on the power adapter and Balanced on battery; a level you already chose stays. Each level shows its measured cost.
• Your own 3D models: import OBJ, USD, USDZ, PLY, STL, glTF and GLB files.
• English and German interface. The app follows the system language.
• Screen saver with the same renderer. It shows the preset of the main display.
• Power aware: pauses in Low Power Mode, when windows cover the whole desktop, and while the Mac is locked, asleep, in the screen saver or switched to another user. 30 frames per second by default, 60 and 120 are available. When the Mac runs hot, the app halves the frame rate and drops one quality level, and shows a still image when it gets critical (switch: Energy > Throttle when hot). With Reduce Motion on in macOS, the app shows a still image too.
• Still image as desktop picture: the app can save a still of the hole as the macOS desktop picture, so the lock screen and Mission Control match.
• Updates: the app checks GitHub once a day and installs a new version on request. You can switch this off.

System requirements

• macOS 15 Sequoia or later
• A Mac with Apple Silicon. The release build is arm64 only.

Install

From the DMG

1. Download the newest BlackHoleWallpaper-<version>.dmg from the releases page.
2. Open it and drag BlackHoleWallpaper.app onto the Applications folder.
3. Optional: double-click Schwarzes Loch.saver to install the screen saver. It then shows up in System Settings under Screen Saver.

The app lives in the menu bar. Start it a second time, for example from Spotlight, to open its settings window.

First start of an unsigned app

The app is ad-hoc signed and not notarized by Apple, so macOS blocks it on the first start. Since macOS 15, right-click > Open no longer gets around that. Two ways that work:

• Remove the quarantine flag in Terminal (use ~/Applications/... if the app lives there):

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/BlackHoleWallpaper.app
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Library/"Screen Savers/Schwarzes Loch.saver"

• Or open the app once, then go to System Settings > Privacy & Security, click Open Anyway and confirm. Do the same for the screen saver.

Homebrew

After the first release:

brew tap digitaliq/tap
brew trust --tap digitaliq/tap
brew install --cask blackhole-wallpaper

Homebrew 7 loads casks from other taps only after brew trust. Homebrew also quarantines the download, so the first start needs the same step as above: xattr -dr or Open Anyway. Updates then come with brew upgrade --cask blackhole-wallpaper; the app does not replace itself in that case.

Build from source

You need the Xcode Command Line Tools. Xcode itself is not needed, the Metal shaders are compiled at runtime.

git clone https://github.com/DigitalIQ/blackhole-wallpaper.git
cd blackhole-wallpaper
./scripts/install.sh

This builds the app, copies it to ~/Applications/BlackHoleWallpaper.app, installs the screen saver to ~/Library/Screen Savers/ and starts the app. ./scripts/make-dmg.sh builds the same app and screen saver into build/BlackHoleWallpaper-<version>.dmg and installs nothing. The version comes from the file VERSION.

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