If light travels so fast, why does this video feel so slow?

For my first free-form blog post, I wanted to share a video I saw last week that blew my mind, just very slowly.

The video shows the reality of what it would be like to traverse our solar system at the speed of light. Cool, right? We get to travel as fast as the fastest known wave-particle in our universe. Sit back and enjoy the ride. I expected the video to go something like this gif below:

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/02/riding-light-video_n_6595092.html

And yet the video (which can be found at the link above) is 45 minutes long, and that's not even our entire solar system. Only at 43 minutes do we reach Jupiter, and if you want to see Saturn, you'll have to sit through another 35 minutes of video.

So, why do we care?

Conceptually, I knew that it takes light 8 minutes to get to the Earth, but that is just a fact I memorized at some point in middle school. There is nothing like sitting through 8 minutes of video to really hone that fact in (though I honestly watched 30 seconds and skipped ahead). Yet the speed of light is so large.  \[3 \cdot 10^{10} \frac{cm}{sec}\]

Which must mean our solar system is big, really big. Once again, this is something we all know, but I'm not sure can truly appreciate. Growing up with models like the one below:

Source: https://www.ou.org/jewish_action/02/2013/the-big-pang-theory/solar-system/

Are great for teaching elementary school kids about the planets, but leave us with a wildly inaccurate model of space. No matter how many facts we memorize or distances we compute, there is nothing like seeing it yourself to subvert the inaccurate models we grew up with. Today in class, Professor Johnson said that no one is born with an instinct for astronomy, and I think this article goes to show how important our methods of learning are for understanding our universe.

Acknowledgements: Although I have included the link twice already, for good measure, the video and article I discuss can be found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/02/riding-light-video_n_6595092.html.