Underwhelmed, you say? Oh jaded, post-modernist! Just fathom these figures: this "monster" black hole is an estimated 40 billion kilometers in diameter or 3 million times the size of Earth, larger than our entire solar system. It looks small because it is only 500 trillion kilometers away. Its mass is 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. It is one of the heaviest in the universe according to Prof. Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands who proposed the experiment to photograph the object with a globe-spanning array of telescopes. He first proposed the idea as a PhD student in 1993. Prof. Falcke finally convinced the European Research Council to fund the project. The result is vindication of his twenty year effort, and further physical evidence supporting Einstein's formidable genius.
The data collected over ten days by the eight linked telescopes, called the Event Horizon Telescope Array, filled hundreds of hard drives--to much data to transmit over the Internet. So the data was assembled an old fashioned way by flying the drives to several central processing centers where the image was resolved using innovative algorithms and supercomputers. This achievement is described as an "extraordinary scientific feat". The team responsible for the feat is also studying the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way, 55 million light years away. The "ring of fire" around the Milky Way's black hole is smaller and dimmer than the one you see around M87's. The bright halo is caused by superheated gas falling into the hole from which no light can escape. The light is brighter than all the billions of other stars in the galaxy combined, which is why it can be see so far from Earth.