Riding Light: Tour the solar system at light speed

Tour the solar system with Riding Light from Alphonse Swinehart on Vimeo.

Riding Light: Tour the solar system

Our solar system is big. Light, the fastest-moving stuff in the universe at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km per second) takes over half an hour to travel to Jupiter, the 5th planet out from the sun. You get a terrific illustration of the solar system’s vastness in the 45-minute video Riding Light. Created by Alphonse Swinehart, the video represents the journey of light across our solar system. It imagines a single photon of light, moving at light speed of course, traveling from the sun in the direction out of our solar system. For the sake of brevity, the video just takes you as far as Jupiter.

As you watch the video, the first four planets pass by in under 13 minutes. Next comes Vesta, the brightest asteroid in the asteroid belt, just before the 20-minute mark of the 45-minute video. Asteroid Ceres is about three minutes later, followed by Pallas two seconds later, and then a three-minute break before Hygiea shows up. Then we settle in for the 17-plus minute wait for Jupiter (and its Galilean satellites!). Saturn would be another 35 minutes out, but the video doesn’t run that long. As we reach more than 500 million miles (800 million kilometers) from the sun, Jupiter grows small, on a par with the even more distant sun, and the video tapers out.

Bonus points for anyone who spots the constellation Orion in the video.

The 2024 lunar calendars are here! Best Christmas gifts in the universe! Check ’em out here.

Other video tours

If you enjoyed that tour of the solar system, you may like some of these other video tours!

Hubble’s Grand Tour of the giant planets

A grand tour of the International Space Station

Take a virtual tour of 6 exoplanets

Tour the moon in 4K

How big are asteroids? See comparative sizes in this video

Bottom line: Take a tour of the solar system at the speed of light. This video imagines the journey of a photon leaving the sun and traveling out past the inner planets to Jupiter.