If you're a sci-fi world builder, then you'd love this software. This is a Work-In-Progress program to generate realistic galaxies. Generate a planetary system around a star, select a planet in that system, and you can get realistic views of the night sky as seen from that planet. You can use it to map constellations and develop a mythology for a constructed culture on that planet.
Thanks for the reply.
The demo image was rendered simply as a set of billboards. Sounds a bit boring I know, but it's the most efficient method. There's currently no nebulae or anything, but I'm going to try and implement that as some kind of volumetric fog generated in the same way as the star placement. The star placement was done as a exclusion test. Each potential star position is a uniformly distributed random variable. At each position a probability is evaluated using a spiral function and an exponential decay function for the halo. If the probability is high enough, the star is placed there. Its mass and luminosity will be higher based on the probability as well. As a result you have dimmer red stars throughout the disk, with bright yellow and white stars in the spiral arms.
If anyone's interested in helping out, I'd be happy to set this up in a git repo.
Interesting approach, thanks for explaining.
I can't say that I have time to help out on it, but it would be greatly appreciated if you release your code to the community. If that is your intention, it might be a good idea to setup a git or hg repo (most people here prefer bitbucket/hg for some reason) under the OSS motto: "release early, release often". Who knows which other contributors might be attracted.