Celestia Forums

ESO has published a beautiful 6000 x 3000 pixel panorama of the Milky Way, made by Serge Brunier with a regular digital camera (http://www.sergebrunier.com/gallerie/pleinciel/index-eng.html, this page also includes a link to an online full screen 3D interactive panorama).
It can be downloaded here: http://www.eso.org/gallery/v/ESOPIA/Galaxies/phot-32a-09-fullres.tif.html
The original is 800 million pixels large by the way! But I used this version, scaled up to a width of 8192 pixels, with Seldens planetarium sphere (http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/billboard-cmod.html#7.2) with satisfactory results, although for more realism one might choose to darken the image. The image was flipped horizontally to appear right. However, there is a misalignment, see picture with Orion. I am not sure what the reason is, it might be in the picture itself. When I compared it with another Milky Way panorama the location of features was slightly different. Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy the panorama picture!

When you GO towards the Milkyway your new 2D image doesn't look very nice, I suppose?
Instead of 2D imaging, we need 3D stuff for consistency...

Fridger

Buzz,

What model graphics card do you have?
Unfortunately, older cards can't handle 8K images.

It'd be nice if Celestia included spheres which could be seen from the inside, so that a Mesh wouldn't have to be used for backdrops like this. That'd also allow arbitrarily large surface textures to be used.

@Fridger: you're right, it's only useful for displaying a view of the Milky Way from the surroundings of the Solar system. And of course I agree that the ultimate goal should be to render everything in 3D in a way that resembles the ESO picture. Until we have the ability to add dark/reflection nebula this will not be possible I suspect. This panorama is not an extra that I will always display in Celestia, but it's nice to have.

@Selden: I have a card with an ATI 2600XT GPU and 256 MB RAM. Using a 4k texture is a good alternative, especially when the image is darkened.