It would be possible to add an object to the center of the milky way for targeting purposes.

I think if you make something that is a child of the milky way object in Uniview, the center of the milky way model is at static xyz 8000 0 -15 pc

You could, for example, take the CygnusX1 module from UCare and change its position from 55 163 9 to 8000 0 -15!

You should also drop the eval tfm in your mod file, which will reorient your speck file. You want to just have it in milkyway coordinates. Some of the older partiview/digital universe datasets have an eval tfm because they weren't really made in the right coordinates in the first place.

Also check out some of the exoplanet systems on ucare, which include markers, and are a more elaborate way to do this.

The best way to do this might be to search for the star you want in the stars.speck file in the star module (or, I suggest, using CAS_stars.mod from ucare, which is a little more complete), most stars have an HD and HIP number as well as a common name, when available. Find the star you want and copy the first three values for your speck file, which will correctly place it in the sky.

Then in your speck file you have radius, I assume to set the radius of your texture, and an orient, but if you don't force and orientation, I believe you can leave that blank and it will always face the Earth.

The numbers in a speck file are galactic x, y, z in pc. You can calculate them from RA, Dec and distance. There's a spreadsheet on Ucare to help out with this

https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8n2uo1xnqo1d6p/plutoapproxcolor.tif?dl=0
and
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3emn2mbx2nercpn/plutobw.tif?dl=0

To my knowledge, QGIS will not make a working tileset. You'd have to use the old tileset tool, although it crashes for me when too big of images are loaded. Sorry, I can't help much there.

Hey Paul,

The layers provided to SCISS are the only WMS service currently available for Pluto. I expect as we get more data (hopefully in a few months) we'll update these layers.

I'd be happy to send you the geotiff itself to make your own tileset, however, this isn't a very space-efficient solution when possible, and I think using WMS (and pre-caching when necessary) is most desirable.

Are these locations on a planet? If so, camera.flyto coords <long> <lat> might work well, because it does orbit around the planet, rather than trying to fly through it. It can be stacked with <objectID>.prop.targetradius <value> to set the distance you end up from the desired location.