Where to find a milky-way skysphere map?

Question

I'm doing a PovRay scene and am using NASA's Blue Marble images as a source to render earth.

I also found some maps for the moon and the sun. Now I also want to have the milky way in the scene. The closest I could find was this star-field which works fine, but does not feature the colorful milky way. After a few hours of fruitless searching I'm at the brink of creating my own using other sky-map sources, but thought I'd give it a shot to ask here before putting effort into this. I need a good high resolution source that can be mapped seamlessly on a sky-sphere in PovRay.

Answer 1

Skysphere is a slightly obscure term. Try this one:

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=milky+way+skybox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

There's various freebie apps around for converting between sky spheres and sky boxes if the skyboxes don't work for you.

Similarly you can "fake" a sky sphere or sky box from a good sized image with those same tools.