Getting data for an accurate night skybox with stars

Why are there no resources for (and games with) accurate stars in the sky?

I implemented a sun movement script that takes the time and calendar into consideration (and latitude and longitude). This is easy enough and you can look it up.

But where can I go to get an array of points for all (or most) of the visible stars in the earth's night sky? Or a cubemap.

Does anyone have Neil DeGrasse Tyson's phone number?

I don't necessarily need nebulae, but bonus points if you can find data on those!

[edit] ok, so day z and mgs v kinda sorta have stars. but where do they get the data?

http://www.skymaponline.net/instructions.html
This website sais it draws the current starmap according to a few databases. Those databases are on the Internet...
Quick Google search and you are done...
http://heasarc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/tycho2.html
https://www.aavso.org/bsc-and-tycho-2-catalogs

Thanks! Some good stuff in there. It's so weird that there isn't a central standardized database (without inconsistencies) from which I can just download a .csv of the 100,000 closest stars. Come on, astrophysicists, get your shit straight! :P

I also came across this: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/starmaps/catalogues.php has some .csv files that have somewhat less than 2.5 million entries.

Now does anyone know how to feed some columns of this csv into Houdini or something, to turn them into particles and render a cubemap? I could do it in engine but it would be prettier rendered with emission and whatnot.

I'm still working on rendering them in houdini (learning).

But in the meantime I also found a 360 spheremap made by nasa's scientific visualization studio. Which I had no idea existed.

Here: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003572/

So you can actually just get this 4096x4096 texture into Unty or Unreal or whatever and sample it as a spheremap and it doesn't look too bad.

You will have to change your skybox shader a bit to rotate the uv coordinates by a rotation matrix sampled from the sun's rotation. (because stars move on the sky...)

You also need to align the cubemap. It is supposed to have its +X coord pointing towards the sun on the spring equinox if you're on earth's equator, +Z is north on earth's axis, and +Y is something called "R.A. 6 hours" which I'm not sure what it stands for.

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