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Start Rolling Your Blunts: Spherical Planetarium Videos Are Here

Pair these videos with some spacedub made from ripples in the curvature of spacetime, and send your mind to the stars.

It's the Friday the week after the holidays: The perfect time to get lost in trippy space videos.

The European Southern Observatory—with headquarters are in Garching near Munich, Germany but also operates in multiple observing sites in Chile—has offered its library of fulldome planetarium shows free to the public for years. But you don't need to own your own planetarium or break into your local science museum to see these beautiful space-sights: They're almost as good right from your laptop screen. Note that they're all circular—or spherical, really—in their view mode. And spherical video is suddenly in vogue now thanks to Snapchat Spectacles.

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Some are like watching the universe form as an embryo inside of an egg, like this simulation of the evolution of everything:

Others are more like soothing snow globes filled with stars, like this view of star clusters in the Milky Way:

Or, like this rendering of the evolution of a dark matter galactic halo, some are more reminiscent of the plasma ball experiments you'd see in mad scientist's lab:

A few of the fulldome videos put you back on earth, like the timelapse ALMA telescopes under the Chilean sky:

And then there's our future home — or at least, how an artist imagined it looked four billion years ago. Maybe it'll look like this again someday?

Pair these videos with some spacedub made from ripples in the curvature of spacetime, and send your mind to the stars.

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