Stars and Milky Way

I've still been working hard on visuals. Not much to show off as it's mostly code stuff but I did replace the background stars.

For the new starry night I grabbed some high res textures of our galaxy from NASA which I lightly edited. Then I built an equirectangular sphere mesh to map the textures to. On that sphere I perform 2 different rotations to indicate time of day and time of year on the background. Finally I manipulate the transparency of the milky way separate from the stars to give a subtle effect of the milky way becoming increasingly bright over the first 30 seconds of darkness.

I'm happy, it makes for some dramatic skies. Hope I can figure out a cloud system to match it. They could look so good together.