Yes. It's better than nothing but unfortunately it has a tendancy to concentrate nebs in particular areas and pile them one on top of another. Which looks kinda funky.
Writing a program to generate random nebula placement is easy. All you're doing is generating osme text with a few random numbers. Checking to see if one neb is close to another is not as easy.
I believe FRED uses Euler angles to position the nebs. Where pitch = elivation and heading = azimuth. I think it's doing the elivation rotation 1st about the x axis and the azimuth rotation 2nd around the y axis. Bearing does not seem to effect the positioning of a neb on the sky sphere. A way to do a distance check might possibly be to simulate a neb starting at (x=0, y=0, z=1), set up a rotation matrix to do the rotations, and apply it to the pretend neb. Thus generating a position in 3d space which could be compared against that of other nebs using the same technique.
Haven't got a clue how to do the math though as I plainly suck at 3d math.
