Guidance on creating a Celestial Sphere I have a project in mind that I want to create with Blender. I'm trying to create what's called a  


  Celestial Sphere.
   In astronomy and navigation, the celestial sphere is an abstract sphere that has an arbitrarily large radius and is concentric to Earth. All objects in the sky can be conceived as being projected upon the inner surface of the celestial sphere, which may be centered on Earth or the observer. If centered on the observer, half of the sphere would resemble a hemispherical screen over the observing location. 
  
   Earth rotating within a
  relatively small-radius geocentric celestial sphere. Shown here are
  stars (white), the ecliptic (red, the circumscription of the Sun's
  apparent annual track), and the lines of right ascension and circles
  of declination (cyan) of the equatorial coordinate system.


I would like to create everything with objects, i.e. I'd like to avoid using a texture wrap on the entire sphere.

What would be a good way of achieving this ?
Wireframe modifier is your friend when you need to create the grid of
the outer sphere
Constellations are just some vertexes connected with edges (the hard part is to put them in the right position - if you have coordinates you can insert them in the object properties > Transform > location XYZ attributes)
you'll need to work with shaders to config how the edges are going to be rendered