On late Wednesday evening, the Event Horizon Telescope released the first-ever glimpse of a super-massive black hole, proving Albert Einstein's century-old theory of general relativity. 

Bathurst astronomer Ray Pickard said it's a big achievement to be able to view the black hole.

"To think that this isn't in our Milky Way galaxy, but in another galaxy much, much further away, about 50 million light-years away, it's an ever bigger achievement," he said.

He explained the intricacies behind how the black hole was able to be viewed.

"The image was actually collected by radio telescopes, not like an optical one you look through," he said.

"Radio telescopes are like the ones at Parkes and the ones that viewed the black hole are spread all over the world, connected to make a super large telescope.

"What the image actually is, is radio waves, with the brightest radio energy showed as the brightest colours."  

But Earth won't have to be worried about getting sucked into this black hole, as it resides about 54 million light years away from home, at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. 

The foundations for the black hole's discovery were laid over a century ago, when Einstein published the equations that defined modern gravitational physics.

General relativity was first described in 1915 and it explained gravity as a phenomenon created when matter warps the geometry of space and time. Curved space and time (spacetime) tells matter how to move.

And while the black hole is massive news for the astronomy scene, there's also plenty of great news for Mr Pickard and the Bathurst Observatory Research Facility.

The observatory will finally begin the move to its new location at Billywillinga, roughly 20 kilometres north of Bathurst. 

Previously, the observatory had been been based at Limeklins Road for almost two decades, but the week after April will see the facility make the move because of the lights and glare from Bathurst's urban growth reducing the ability of the facility's telescopes to see as far or as well. 

"We really want to re-open again for tours in time for the 50^th anniversary for the Apollo 11 moon landing, which happened in July," Mr Pickard said.

"We've been holding out for some government grants, but we didn't have any luck, so we bit the bullet and decided to do it ourselves and get going now."