A group of astronomers has done something incredible: They captured the first photograph ever taken of a black hole. The image, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope and released by the National Science Foundation, a U.S. government agency, is haunting in its simplicity: a hazy red loop of cosmic flame set against the backdrop of space, ringed around an even deeper blackness. So powerful is the gravitational pull of that inner void that nothing, not even light, can escape.

The public responded with a modicum of awe and some jokes. (The image does bear a striking resemblance to the Eye of Sauron.) But it wasn’t hard to find disdain among some observers. “Science, let us know when you find a more photogenic black hole,” Slate’s Heather Schwedel quipped. “If you told me instead, ‘You are looking at a scientific marvel that should really blow your mind,’ I would say: no I’m not,” Splinter’s Hamilton Nolan wrote, perhaps tongue-in-cheek. “Maybe your mind is more easily blown [than] mine. That I would believe.”

This level of cynicism is better understood as ignorance. The image itself might indeed seem unimpressive. But judging it as you would any other digital photograph, shorn of all context and understanding, would be shortsighted. One also has to consider the thought and labor behind its creation. The photograph might not depict the horror of galactic destruction as some expected, but it represents something even better.

Physicists have suspected the existence of black holes for almost 90 years, since special relativity toppled Newton’s vision of an orderly universe. “Here, according to Einstein’s theory, matter, space, and time come to an end and vanish like a dream,” The New York Times’s Dennis Overbye wrote of the black hole. But actually sighting one in the wild is no easy feat. This particular black hole dwells in Messier 87, the scientific name for a distant galaxy in the constellation Virgo. An international team of astronomers used a network of ten radio telescopes across four continents to hunt for it. “For a few days in April 2017,” The Atlantic’s Marina Koren wrote, “the observatories studied the skies in tandem, creating a gargantuan telescope nearly the size of the planet.”

Think about it: A group of mostly hairless primates, stranded on a rock circling a nuclear spark, used radio waves to photograph an invisible sun-eater so far away that a person would have to travel for 55 million years at the speed of light to reach it. It’s hard to not feel a frisson of awe at the scale of the feat. This context is vital to fully appreciating the image itself, in the same way that the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling is even more impressive when you know that Michelangelo spent three years of his adult life bent over backwards to paint it.