From left to right: a demonstration of our synthetic imaging pipeline: Panel a: starts with a 2D cut through our 3D RMHD jet colored by thermal density. Panels b–e: zoomed into an unobscured region of the jet’s standing shock (demarcated with a purple box in panel a) and show: (b) the ray-traced synchrotron emission without the use of a jet tracer; (c) the ray-traced synchrotron emission with the use of a jet tracer to exclude the ambient medium; (d) the same simulation epoch but rotated to a viewing angle of i = 5°; and (e) the ray-traced image convolved with a Gaussian beam indicative of the resolution of the GMVA and with a Gaussian noise floor (to mimic array sensitivity) of 10⁻¹ Jy beam⁻¹.