Panorama to HDRi (Solved)

[Paul Mc]

I'm working on an animation where I need to be able to rotate a starry sky as if in a timelapse video. I'm using Blender to do the animation but what I need is a convincing sky. I can find quite a few low quality night sky equirectangular HDRis but not high quality/high resolution ones. However, there are quite a few high resolution photographs, some of which are panoramas, that might be available to be used in this way and I wondered if anyone had been down this path with Affinity Photo. I'm thinking this would be done by stitching together stills to cover a region of the sky that is to be used (I probably don't need a full 360 degree dome), then faking exposures to build the HDRi and finally re-projecting on to a dome. For the final step I could always use Blender to create the equirectangular projection if I have a good image that doesn't stretch on a dome - stars don't stretch and the result is very quickly noticed by the human eye!

Update: I found some celestial star maps photographed and stitched by NASA that look like they will do the trick.