The Alternative Night Sky - Another Time - Another Place

Periodically our group needs to generate visualizations of another location in the galaxy, or another time in the galaxy. For context to make the view more appealing, we might like to include background stars - but showing our standard view of the night sky from Earth just seems not quite right. And then there are some (like this author) who sometimes want to make a big deal about such details, so why don't I just solve the problem.

This texture is built from the Tycho Catalog skymap. The same stars are included, but the brighter stars are repositioned by computing a random offset from their usual positions. This alters the star patterns to less recognizable forms while keeping groups of fainter stars, such as the Milky Way, intact. This technique does keep a number of the dust lanes in the galactic disk intact.