Turning Suns into Black Holes

My youngest son sustained a concussion at school on Monday (we had to talk about how playing football on the blacktop might not have been the smartest decision in the world...).  So, he is currently in concussion protocol, which involves him staying home from school for a few days (though he is back for a half day today), no physical activities where he could hit his head for several weeks (which means his hockey season is also now over a bit earlier than planned), no reading for sustained periods, no screen time.  Pretty much anything he would want to do, he can't do.

Yesterday morning he was stir crazy looking for something to do, and found his old little toy camera that he must have gotten for Christmas a couple years ago.  It was out of batteries, so I replaced those, and he went around the house taking pictures.

I am not sure what made him think to do it, but at at one point he started taking pictures of the sun.  I am not sure if the camera can't handle the brightness of the actual sun itself, or if there is some safety feature for kids lacking in common sense, but his camera blacks out the actual disc of the sun, while leaving the rest of the light halo around it.

Anyway, he was interested in it, and came over to show me.

The image below is a picture I took a little later just to frame it up easier so you can see what I am talking about (he had zoomed in and it just looked like a random black hole):

Through the magic of the VTech Kidizoom camera, the sun was transformed into either a black hole or a solar eclipse (new moon shining), or both.  What is this new devilry?  Again, the things I can think of are the camera can't handle the brightness so it blacks out those pixels, or it has a very rudimentary brightness limiter for safety which blacks out images over a certain amount.  I don't know.

After showing me his black shining sun, he took a few more pictures.  There are some special effects for kids on the camera where it does things like add animation, tile images, apply weird filters, etc. He apparently took a massively zoomed in picture of one of our rugs and then did a tiling effect.  He thought it was important to show me that one as well, so for his second picture he showed me this:

I already had Black Holes on my mind from the first picture he showed me, so when he came by next with this one, I thought of the "Tesseract" from the movie Interstellar.  The Tesseract was what Cooper ended up in as he descended into the Black Hole.  It was through this structure that Cooper was able to communicate through means of his daughter's bookshelf in the past.  As in, Cooper could travel through time, but was very limited in where and how he could manipulate matter as he did so.  For whatever reason, it was really only through the bookshelf that he could interact with his daughter Murph.

Here is an image of the Tesseract from the movie.  

I think it was the image of horizontal and vertical lines coming together and weaving through each other in my son's picture that first brought it to mind, as well as the color scheme itself, which seemed quite similar with browns, grays, and whites.  The movie scene and depiction is much darker overall, and it isn't really an exact fit (or as close a fit as I originally imagined), but it is just what came to my mind when he showed me the second picture, which again my brain was definitely steered toward having seen the black hole from his first photo.  

Anyway, his photography definitely fits with some recent themes, particularly that first one.