Image applied to a sphere looks bad

[ViaCognita]

Hi!

I have an image of the night sky with the Milky Way prepared to be applied to a sphere: the top and bottom of the image are stretched so that when it is on a sphere it will be displayed correctly.
When I apply it to the sphere, it looks like this:

This is the material for that sphere:

What can I do to make it look like an sphere?

By the way, I’m not trying to create a Skybox. I’m trying to understand how to apply this kind of textures to a static mesh.

Thanks!

[ClockworkOcean]

You can change the UV mapping of the sphere. You have one option there

and the other will give you pinching at the top and bottom

If you want to make it somehow seamless, then something like a skybox is the way forward.

[ViaCognita]

@ClockworkOcean

You can change the UV mapping of the sphere. You have one option there

Thanks. I’ll search where is that option because I don’t know where it is.

I have created another sphere changing the Subdivision Type to Lat Long, and it looks great:

I could mark this reply as a solution unless someone has a better one, instead of recreating the sphere.