A series of new animations by a NASA scientist show just how zippy – and also how torturously slow – the speed of light can be. Light speed is the fastest that any material object can travel through space. That is, of course, barring the existence of theoretical shortcuts in the fabric of space called wormholes (and the ability to go through them without being destroyed).

In a perfectly empty vacuum, a particle of light, which is called a photon, can travel 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second), or about 670.6 million mph (1.079 billion kilometers per hour).

This is incredibly fast. However, light speed can be frustratingly slow if you’re trying to communicate with or reach other planets, especially any worlds beyond our solar system.

To depict the speed limit of the cosmos in a way anyone could understand, James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, took it upon himself to animate it.

“My animations were made to show as instantly as possible the whole context of what I’m trying to convey,” O’Donoghue told Business Insider via Twitter. “When I revised for my exams, I used to draw complex concepts out by hand just to truly understand, so that’s what I’m doing here.”

O’Donoghue said he only recently learned how to create these animations – his first were for a NASA news release about Saturn’s vanishing rings. After that, he moved on to animating other difficult-to-grasp space concepts, including a video illustrating the rotation speeds and sizes of the planets. He said that one “garnered millions of views” when he posted it on Twitter.

O’Donoghue’s latest effort looks at three different light-speed scenarios to convey how fast (and how painfully slow) photons can be.