Abstract
It is shown that the optical geometry of the Reissner–Nordström exterior metric can be embedded in a hyperbolic space all the way down to its outer horizon. The adopted embedding procedure removes a breakdown of flat-space embeddings which occurs outside the horizon, at and below the Buchdahl–Bondi limit (R/M = 9/4 in the Schwarzschild case). In particular, the horizon can be captured in the optical geometry embedding diagram. Moreover, by using the compact Poincaré ball representation of the hyperbolic space, the embedding diagram can cover the whole extent of radius from spatial infinity down to the horizon. Attention is drawn to the advantages of such embeddings in an appropriately curved space: this approach gives compact embeddings and it clearly distinguishes the case of an extremal black hole from a non-extremal one in terms of the topology of the embedded horizon.