Imaging an Event Horizon: Mitigation of Source Variability of
  Sagittarius A*
  The black hole in the center of the Galaxy, associated with the compact
source Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is predicted to cast a shadow upon the emission
of the surrounding plasma flow, which encodes the influence of general
relativity in the strong-field regime. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a
Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) network with a goal of imaging nearby
supermassive black holes (in particular Sgr A* and M87) with angular resolution
sufficient to observe strong gravity effects near the event horizon. General
relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations show that radio emission
from Sgr A* exhibits vari- ability on timescales of minutes, much shorter than
the duration of a typical VLBI imaging experiment, which usually takes several
hours. A changing source structure during the observations, however, violates
one of the basic assumptions needed for aperture synthesis in radio
interferometry imaging to work. By simulating realistic EHT observations of a
model movie of Sgr A*, we demonstrate that an image of the average quiescent
emission, featuring the characteristic black hole shadow and photon ring
predicted by general relativity, can nonetheless be obtained by observing over
multiple days and subsequent processing of the visibilities (scaling,
averaging, and smoothing) before imaging. Moreover, it is shown that this
procedure can be combined with an existing method to mitigate the effects of
interstellar scattering. Taken together, these techniques allow the black hole
shadow in the Galactic center to be recovered on the reconstructed image.
