Riding Light(2015)

Riding Light Synopsis

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.

Riding Light (2015) is a animation and documentary film directed by Alphonse Swinehart, released on January 1, 2015 with a runtime of 45m. Viewers rate it 8.0 out of 10 across 2 ratings.