Looking for images of sky at specific latitudes / times of day

[Ags]

I am working on a game and at the moment I am putting the finishing touches to the 'skybox' - the backdrop that displays the blue sky, sun, moon, clouds... and stars. The stars are the last bit I need to add, and as an SGLer I of course want to do this properly! I need to find digital images of the sky projected as a sky dome (like in the middle of Sky at Night magazine) - in fact two images, one for each half of the sky. To make things more difficult, I want to orient the milky way along the edge of the skydome, as this should help disguise the loss of resolution at the edge.

Alternately, I could generate the image myself if I could find a spreadsheet or similar dataset giving the location, magnitude and if possible the spectral class of the stars down to 7th or 8th magnitude. Surely such a thing must be in the public domain?

[nmoushon]

Could you use Stellarium? You could take screen shots for the major star location and apply to your skybox. Not sure if it would work as I'm no game designer but it might.

[Ags]

Yes, I was thinking of stellarium screen captures - the resolution I passing to the graphics card is 1024x1024, so that approach would yield good results. On the other hand, I quite fancy visualizing the (the brighter bits of the) Hipparchos catalog. These distractions are why the game is never finished :-)

[nameunknown]

isn't all that number crunching going to slow the game down? - I mean if you are after the zombie minions of the leather goddess of Demos with a BFG do you care where the stars are? - OK perhaps its a HP Lovecraft style thing where the "stars have to be right"?

Me - I'd just plaster any old skybox on

P

[Ags]

Nah, I would generate the textures I need offline - all the game would see would be one static 1024x1024 image containing 2 cloud images and 2 skydomes in the 4 RGBA channels. That way I only have to fetch one texture when rendering the sky.

At the moment I am much more interested in a beautiful skybox than I am in playability... you should see my sunsets and drifting clouds!

[Ags]

Ah-ha! I found this site - it produces nice starry domes for any part of the sky. If you ask for a big 4096x4096 pixel image, it shows a good scaling of blob sizes for star magnitudes - which should be convertible to grayscale differences when I downscale to 1024x1024. It looks like I will have to paint in the milky way however.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Yoursky