So I needed to make a high res night sky, and I figured, rather than just randomly sprinkling stars on a texture, I should actually do it right. After searching around for a bit, I came across this site:
http://astronexus.com/node/34The HYG database contained like 150,000+ stars, with their Cartesian coordinates, magnitude, color index, etc. Everything I needed to make an accurate starry sky.
So... I rendered them as particles inside of Paintball2:
If you cross your eyes, you can see the big dipper in 3D!
I'll try to put together a video later, since it's pretty cool to actually walk (or strafe jump) around the stars.
For the purposes of rendering a skybox, though, it was more practical to map all the stars to a sphere, and scale them based off of the magnitude value as seen from earth.
Here are a couple screenshots of what I think are about as accurate as I can get for the skybox:
A view of the north star (with the big and little dipper... about the only constellations I can identify, lol).
Orion, toward the upper left.
What it looks like when you go outside the sphere.
All rendered in Paintball2 in a horribly inefficient manner.
