Need a high resolution, equirectangular projections of a celestial sphere full of stars? NASA GSFC has ’em – plus constellation stick figures, IAU boundaries, and a celestial coordinate grid.
Tip of the hat to Kevin Scott at E&S who posted this on the Fulldome email list.
cgskies.com boasts over 300 panoramic high dynamic range (HDR) sky scenes. Most of these are, naturally, daytime or sunset scenes, and have resolutions up to 15k pixels wide. I haven’t tried them out in our dome, but they look promising for use in fulldome!
Also check out their resources page for tutorials and links to software to convert cylindrical equirectangular panoramas to other projections.
Make sure to look over their terms of use before purchasing images for use in your productions. (Not that there’s anything there that should be a concern; it’s just always a good habit.)
The official Adobe After Effects Twitter feed recently pointed to this gem on YouTube: Terry Gilliam in his Monty Python days, showing how he creates his animations. Great advice from Gilliam about five minutes in: know the limitations of the medium and use them to your advantage. If you can’t animate every little natural movement, embrace that and make it part of your style.