Stars in my pocket like randomly generated pixels

Something my Star Wars poster modding made me realise is I never draw epic scifi-ish images and overall tend to be frustrated by any attempts to draw things like stars and explosions. So I went through APOD until I found something fun to draw:


Everything done in Photoshop, either generated or drawn. I wasn't going for pinpoint accuracy, just trying to get across the basic gist.

This star tutorial was very useful, I created the layered coloured look by a series of folders set to "lighten", each containing a layer of solid colour (a mix of bright orange and blue) and then a starscape set to "Luminosity". Th lumpier stars were made by applying "Filters:Pixellate:Pointillise" to the noise and filling in the white bits with black.

Unfortunately I couldn't get the lens flare generator to create what I wanted so I made my own very inefficiently.