Let's go over some of the basics that are essential for making good Space Engine shots.

1. Disable the Green Text, You can do this by pressing "Ctrl" and "~" at the same time (By default), Doing this will gurantee more attention/make the shot look way nicer, since the text covers a quarter of the screen.

2. Disable the "HUD"

Do you see the section I have circled in red? You need to click that until you can move your cursor away and it would disappear/fade.

3. Don't be afraid to use the "editor"
(I will cover this in more detail in my next section)
You can access the editor section by pressing "ESC" and then clicking the "editor" button.
Note, you need to select the planet/sun/moon before going in the editor because otherwise the "Edit planet" section would not be clickable

4. Don't be afraid to go out of your way and take different angles and such!

Those are the basics! You can check out more in depth things by going to the next section

Now that you have gone through the basics, Let's talk about what seperates
This :

From this :

If you haven't figured out, This is exactly the same image, Just edited using the ingame editor feature, I will walk you through what I did to make this image pop

First of all, I went ahead and selected that gas giant and made its rings bigger and brighter, this feature is at the very end of the editor menu, You should find it fairly easly.

I then selected the star and adjusted its temperature to make the atmosphere a different color, As you can see in the examples above, One was darker blue (Almost purple) while the other was light blue, If you want blue or purple, increase the temperature, however, If you want red or orange lower the temperature.

Next, I selected a Moon with an atmosphere and picked a location that I liked.

Lastly, Please wait for everything to render before taking your shots, the difference can be extremely big and can be the difference between 10 likes and 100.

After everything is set, Take the shot, and you are done!
Right?
Nope, I will give you a fair warning
The editor can glitch really bad and cause your game to crash if you set it to extreme things, such as increasing a planets radius to max would make it look bad, I should also mention, If you exit the game and come back in your edited changes would be removed and everything would be set to default again.

Great, now that you have learned how to make good looking shots, you have come to the last part of the guide, Pano making, This can either be frustrating or fun.
At first it will be annoying and frustrating
But suprise!
You have a guide to guide you, That will teach you how to make a pano and upload it!

First, let's talk about camera work, you need 2 images or more to make a pano
but for the sake of this guide being short and nice I will use 3 as an example , You need The center, The right side, and the left side, The images need to overlap
While taking the shots, Keep your mouse fairly straight while moving to the right side or left side.
I should also mention, freezing time can stop stretching and uneeded things to happen, to stop time press the space bar

Second, Download this stitch tool
Microsofts image composite editor [research.microsoft.com]

(You need to have space engine as a non steam game in your steam library for this next step to work)
After you have downloaded the stitch tool you need to copy and paste your space engine shots from your folder, you can get into the folder by going to "View" at the top left and then go to screenshots and then select "Space Engine" Then go to "show disk" and copy and paste the images to your desktop.

Now that you have all three images, open up the stitch tool and click "New panorama from images"

Next, Click add images and double click the images you want to be part of this panorama and then click next, wait for it to stitch together, Your image shoud look something like this.



After that, click on the option "Perspective" and then center the image to what you want to be seen, then click next, and you should see something similar to this.



Next, Click on the auto complete option (I highlighted it in the pic)
And it should look something like this



Then crop it, To make a pano, It should be wide but short.
For example, I usually make it something between 6000 and 5000 pixels by 1300 or 1400 pixels.

And once you had cropped it and you are happy with it, click next, and it should look something like this.



You are almost done!
Next, you have gotta head to the area I have highlighted and set the quality to whichever setting you would like and click export images, now it should be in your desktop now! yay, and should look something like this!





But.....We are not quite done yet, we still need to put it in the folder.

So now that you have your panoramic image, open the space engine screenshots folder, and then go and pick the last shot you took, sadly, that shot will get replaced by your pano, so if you planned on using it, then you should enter space engine take a shot of something you will not use and instead use that as the latest shot

Now, Copy the name of the your latest shot, And then rename the pano to that.
After you are done that, Take the latest and delete it/get it out of your folder and place the pano in the the folder instead, but wait, don't close it yet, you still need to set the thumbnail, So go to the thumbnail folder that is inside your screenshot folder and replace that old latest shot with your new pano shot.

Now, If you can't see your pano, you haven't done anything wrong, Because you need to restart steam in order for your pano to appear, and when I say restart I mean end the task.

Now open steam
And voila!
Your pano should appear, Now, Incase you messed up something don't worry, You can either redo those steps or you can wait until I can take a video version of this huge wall of text!