I vaguely remember something along those lines, but the equipment was something academic. You wouldn't actually be able to see anything.

On the other hand, you can se thngs happen at light speed in space, as long as the light is bright enough and the distance great enough.

Notice however, that you cannot observe light from the side. You have to deflect part of the beam from its path so that it strikes your eye. To get the idea, look at a laser pointer in the dark from beside the beam of course! In very clear air you cannot see it passing. In practice one usually can see it, but that is because there always is some dust or aerosol in the air. Out in space you would see nothing before the beam hits something to scatter it. The same would apply if you slowed light down through really clear glass or crystal.

Now, suppose you put a satellite in the L5 point of the Earth - moon system, and scattered a very diffuse puff of fine white powder in space between the moon and the satellite. Now you send a series of intense laser pulses from satellite to moon. Each pulse would take something over 1 second to pass through the mistiness, so you could see the light leaping from source to target. Do the same thing with the Earth - sun system, and you could watch the progress for something like 8 minutes.

At cosmological distances flashes for supernovae have been observed passing through nebulae, if I remember correctly.

Slow enough for you? By modulating your laser beam, you could even use the light path as a delay-line data memory!

Cheers,

Jon

Not only is it possible, but it has been done. Dr. Lene Hau has successfully slowed light down to 38 mph, which is pretty slow. Her work can be found here:http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/02.18/light.html

and an video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK6HxdUQm5s&noredirect=1

The concept of using a thick/opaque fluid medium is understood to refract light and to slow it down. What is happening is that the wave packet the light travels in is being compressed by the refractive properties of the medium. Imagine a plane wall with air to glass to water to glass to air interfaces. Now you point a laser at the plane wall and the laser travels through the air, through the glass, through the water, back through glass, and then through air. The light is slowing down accordingly based on the refractive indices of each corresponding medium, in other words each component of the system, the air, the glass, and the water all act as loose forms of "resistance" or impedence to the lights vector quantities, that is velocity and direction. The frequency remains the same, however the period changes. An example would be our plane wall; the light comes in at a set frequency and period, however once the light goes through the glass its period is compressed, then when it passes through the water, it is compressed further. This causes the light to travel at a fraction of its normalized velocity, 3x10^8m/sec or 186,000 mi/sec.

Now know this to be true, however the reduced velocities are still orders of magnitude away from what the human eye can percieve. That is where the Bose-Einstein Condensate comes in. B-EC is a very strange object indeed. It is a group of atoms that has been reduced to such low temperatures, near absolute zeroe, that they are oscillating in unison. The effect is such that the substrate behaves as a super atom. In other words, the system behaves as one.  Now this allows physicists to really put the brakes on light, since the Condensate behaves like a fluid solid that is highly opaque. The effects on light are astounding. For example you could have a light wave that is miles in length, but once it enters the B-EC can be compressed to picrometers, this is a billion scale reduction!