In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it’s unfortunately very slow.
This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system.
I’ve taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, but overall I’ve kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour.
Music: Steve Reich “Music for 18 Musicians”
Performed by: Eighth Blackbird eighthblackbird.org/
