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 surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective. Liberties were taken with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, as well as ignoring the laws of relativity concerning what a photon actually "sees" or how time is experienced at the speed of light, but overall the size and distances of all the objects were kept as accurate as possible. It was also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter to keep the running length below an hour.
The film discusses the evolution and potential of using light waves, particularly coherent light, fo...

This feature-length documentary is a portrait of eclipse chasers, people for whom solar eclipses - a...

Cave paintings and lunar calendars exist in the caves and remains of prehistoric hunters studied rec...

Documentary about the Griffith Observatory, shown at their Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon Theater

This shows physicist Stephen Hawking's life as he deals with the ALS that renders him immobile and u...

To help visualize the dramatic final chapter in Cassini's remarkable story, NASA's Jet Propulsion La...

What if you could get behind the wheel and race through space? We scale down the Solar System to the...

The Academy Award® nominee Cosmic Voyage combines live action with state-of-the-art computer-generat...

Chaco Canyon, located in northwest New Mexico, is perhaps the only site in the world constructed in ...

The first American space station Skylab is found in pieces scattered in Western Australia. Putting t...

From the territories of the Arctic to the farthest reaches of the universe, Worlds of Ice shows us t...

What forms might life take in the Solar System and beyond? In the Academy's newest original planetar...

A brief visualisation of NASA’s historic spacecrafts Mariner, Pioneer, Voyager, and Dawn, exploring ...

Photo sequence of the rare transit of Venus over the face of the Sun, one of the first chronophotogr...

An incredible travel through space and time between the walls of the Paris Observatory, which is cel...

For thirty years, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered new alien worlds, black holes, and th...

The show tells a thrilling story of the most remarkable space mission in human history.

Part of the Almost Famous series. Jocelyn Bell was a graduate student at Cambridge in 1967 when she ...

New planets are now being discovered outside our solar system on a regular basis, and these strange ...