It’s not too far off what you’d see if you could see clearly through several million kilometers of air, I think, which means it’s a decent “NASA artist’s conception” of the Ringworld–intended to be as accurate as possible while still giving a clear impression of the thing-ness of it, by contrast with a blurry smear in a telescope. Technically it’s less accurate, but it gives a more accurate understanding of the Ringworld’s nature than the apparent “endless flat land beneath an arch” that keeps fooling the Ringworld’s more primitive inhabitants. Similarly, the sun wouldn’t bloom and outline the shadow squares in vacuum, but depicting it that way shows you what’s actually there instead of the illusion of real perception.
It also doesn’t get relative scales as wildly wrong as some depictions do, e.g. no cities visible from a million miles out, no rim walls visible from the center. My main gripe is that the perspective on the shadow squares makes it look like there’s a lot less of them than there are shadows on the Ring…
Sorry to prattle on, I just reread Throne and Children and it’s all fresh in my head.
