Well, OK, in real-life you couldn't watch this. The region just outside of a black hole, known as a photon sphere, doesn't allow viewing for the simple reason that it swallows up light, trapping it in a curved path around the hole. It's invisible by definition.Nonetheless, Hui Liu at Nanjing University in China and colleagues were able to create the above model using a sheet of plastic and mimicking the effect of gravity on light by altering the sheet's refractive index around a sphere. The result is a beam of light feeling roughly the effect that some source of extreme gravity might exert on it, bending and eventually trapping the light in a kind of shell. It's not inside of the black hole, yet still in its gravitational grasp as if in a purgatory between singularity and space.