Light travels in photons that are either emitted from hot objects like light bulb filaments, or reflected off of cooler objects, like the walls. The Sun and Moon are also emission and reflection objects, respectively. Photons travel from their source to our eye or camera sensor at, well, the speed of light. We can express this speed in terms with which we are already accustomed, like miles per hour (mph). Since light travels at 186,282 miles per second, that equates to 670.6 million mph. That is incredibly fast! Since mph has a distance component (miles), we can use the speed of light, or the speed of anything else, to measure distance. If something is 670.6 million miles away, we can also say that it is one light-hour away.

The amount of time involved essentially becomes the yardstick. The Moon is about two light-seconds away. The Sun is eight light-minutes away. A light-hour does not get us all the way to Saturn, and the closest star is four light-years away. Galactic sizes are on the scale of hundreds of thousands of light-years, and intergalactic distances are on the scale of millions and even billions of light-years. There’s nothing like the distances across the vast emptiness of space to make light seem to flow like molasses.

An implication of light’s incredibly slow speed is that our eyes are essentially time machines. The point at which Saturn appears in the sky is actually where it was over an hour ago. Similarly, The Andromeda Galaxy, our closest galactic neighbor, is seen as it was 2.5 million years ago. A supernova detected today in a galaxy located 11 million light-years away actually happened 11 million years ago.

It is entirely possible that Betelgeuse, 650 light years away, has already gone supernova, and that information has not yet reached Earth.