Illustration of the M_BH constraints for the mock data sets described in the text. Each dashed curve represents a separate realization of the noise. In the left panel, the potential is spherical, no PSF convolution is performed, and each DF component has 5 × 10⁸ stars. In the right panel, the model is flattened, projected stellar positions are convolved with a circular Gaussian PSF with a standard deviation of 5 pc, and each DF component has 5 × 10⁹ stars. The 1D χ² curves are obtained by marginalizing over V_c in the smoothed 2D χ² landscape generated by Gaussian process regression with a squared-exponential covariance function (Pedregosa et al. 2011).