Start Your Weekend With The Hubble Space Telescope's Planetarium Clips

You may not own your own private planetarium — or if you do, can we come over to your house? But you can still experience a journey through the wonders of space, thanks to four new "fulldome" planetarium clips, released by the Hubble Space Telescope. They're available in 4K and 8K resolution.

According to the Hubble site:

ESA/Hubble is releasing a series of stunning fulldome clips, freely available to planetariums across the globe as part of the 25th anniversary celebrations. The clips are in 4k and 8k fulldome format and rendered for uni-directional domes.

Check out the four newly released clips below, and go to the Space Telescope site to download them in high resolution. And don't forget to check back — because new clips will be released every month around the 24th of the month.

You're going to want to view the clips below in fullscreen and HD, because that's the only way to appreciate them properly.

RS Puppis encroaches on the viewer in this fulldome clip of the Cepheid variable star. The star's pulsation creates the concentric circles of blue light present in the surrounding gas and dust; an example of an unusual phenomenon known as light echo.

More info, and original image, here.

An enormous cluster of galaxies known as Abell 2218 appears in this fulldome clip. The cluster is so massive and compact that the gravitational field it produces bends, distorts and magnifies light from objects that lie behind it. This produces a useful kind of cosmic lens that allows astronomers to peer at very distant objects which would otherwise be too faint to see. The strange arcs of light which seem to be smeared across the lens in this video are actually examples of such remote galaxies; their appearance having been distorted almost beyond recognition by the powerful effects of the foreground cluster.

More info, and original image, here.

This fulldome clip provides a look at the kaleidoscopic chaos of the Carina Nebula. The radiation and energetic streams of particles being emitted by nearby stars eat away at the pillars as baby stars are born within them.

More info, and original image, here.

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