Upper panel: selected part of the synthetic bolometric light curve (black line, smoothed), including the computed angular diameters for 28 snapshots of our AGB model. The base value of the angular diameter was set to be similar to that of R Car. The Rosseland radius was converted to the angular diameter using the distance of R Car (vertically shifted by –2 mas). Lower panel: phase diagram showing the phase shifts between the synthetic light curve (black dots) and the angular diameters for different atmospheric layers.