Following the maxim work smart, not hard, I thought about the spiral galaxy Iw as trying to make in Maya. As this will be used solely as a backdrop to a larger image, there was no need to have this in 3d, so I looked up some photoshop tutorials on galaxy creation.
Spiral galaxy created in Photoshop
This was done following the neat tutorial at http://blog.hexagonstar.com/galaxy-tutorial/
Good work! Now to just work on playing with the settings to get a more stylised, super high res, galaxy of my own to mess around with.