Visualization of star catalogs and celestial coordinates

Question

Does anyone have a suggested methodology for visualizing data in a star catalog, such as the Bright Star Catalog.

I think that there would be a conditional sphere and point of view, that is, in the center of this sphere with two vectors representing the direction of the review and the horizons of the presentation.

I would then somehow project from the celestial catalog the Celestial coordinates (like points on a sphere) on the viewport and draw a color pixel based on the color temperature of this star.

Can anyone give any hints or suggestions?

Can this be done with billboards in OpenGL?

or perhaps a list of GL_POINTS

Answer 1

You are trying to project points on a sphere onto a plane - this is what cartographic projections do . So yes, there are many resources for this. If you can’t find any comments, I’ll dig them out for you.

For the celestial sphere, you look towards the "surface" of the sphere from the inside, and not when you look at the map, from a conditional point above the surface of the Earth, looking down. But the math is the same. And for the celestial sphere, if you just take beautiful pictures, you can stick to spherical mathematical, and not all ugly things that have to deal with a flattened spheroid with impacts like Earth.