You guys need more forest fires. We get great sunsets on the east coast because of the forest fires on the west coast.
These are pictures I took with my phone, just straight shots, no filters.
(I had to reduce this one in size)
Here’s a view from a recent flight in a Warrior over southern NH
Here’s an example of a fairly typical boring UK sunset. This is what I’d expect to see in the sim in the UK, but I get sunsets like yours! (Which look great by the way!)
Even a fairly decent one like this, there isn’t that fiery red and orange that the sim insists on producing and the clouds are still grey!
Those are still nice sunsets 
Nah, the ‘post your sunset’ thread really was an invitation to post sunsets, despite the first one being worded in a way that would suggest it’s a dig. I hope it continues for 10,000 posts cos some of those pictures in there are spectacular. This thread seems a much more sensible place to post comparison pics.
And rather than pretty pictures of sunsets some people have posted in here, I’d rather see what your sunset looks like when it’s not pretty compared to whats in the sim. For me, every sunset under cloud cover looks more like a rad storm in Fallout 4.
When it sometimes takes five or ten seconds seeing a picture and one is still wondering if it´s a screenshot from Flight Sim 20 or a real photograph, one slowly understand that the Matrix is slowly becoming real.
I wonder if even Neo sometimes wants back into the Matrix to fly his favorite Cessna inside the FS2020-Matrix in VR?
Absolute superb graphics quality…
No dispute here, you’re absolutely right. However, we’re not talking about graphics quality, we’re talking about whether it matches reality.
seems to match reality for me 
It is impossible to fully virtualize the earth in a 100% accurate way because a team of developers will never be able to know for example where exactly every tree or group of tree stands, how high these trees are, and even when having height maps of mountains or hills it is hard to reproduce the accurate shape of the landscape of every corner of the earth.
That´s why people who live next to airports or airfields or real pilots who exactly know their flight route will always spot some differences compared to reality when flying in the simulator 
In this case it’s correct as the sun is illuminating the clouds from underneath. In the sim it’s always that colour.
That’s one. Every day for a week and we’ll have some nice data.
The other day I was messing around trying to get MSFS to look just like XP. If you turn off all the Bing stuff, you get a pretty nice generated world. MSFS uses what I call cinematic lighting (rich, exciting), but XP prides itself on realism (5 shades of grey with a splash of color).
Wow great pickup with that! It is indeed the shadow of the planet, yet another piece of evidence that the Earth is not flat! 
I hope sometime we can get anticrespular rays and borealis, and other atmospheric conditions.
There’s a thin high level cirrus in that photo, which is scattering the sim. There’s something blocking the sun (probably a towering cumulus or CB) towards the horizon. The result are called Crespular Rays
Anticrespular rays are seen when the partially blocked sun is behind your viewpoint and look like rays converging to a point opposite the sun on the horizon. They look incredible from the sky!
Sunsets also tend to be a bit amazing every time in the sim. Sunsets aren’t always amazing though, generally only when there’s something for the light to reflect off.
This is pure technical problem and ASOBO can’t solve it right now. One day in the future will be better and closer to reality … maybe … and fluorescent light sources are problematic also…
Realism ? Unsure if I understand your opinion right, but I would not say the second image (XP) looks anywhere near realism. It is very straightforward rendering. The orange is a simple gradient and also it has a very strange mountain shading in the middle-left. It seems the sun shines through the mountains, giving them a morning glow. These mountains should be black, like the MSFS image shows. The only way light can reach them would be cloud reflection… but I doubt it would be that prominent. The sun is already under the horizon, the image shows too much light imho.
What I meant was the XP engine tries, IMHO, to be as realistic as possible. I tried to adjust the haze to be low and visibility to be maximum. It looks like there’s still a bit of atmospheric haze in the distance with the XP shots. That’s as low as it would go in the settings. MSFS has darker blacks, clearer atmosphere, and a broader range of colors across the image. I believe, IMHO, Asobo has chosen the correct approach with cinematic, or theater lighting. It feels more like you are in a movie in MSFS.
It’s hard to compare apples to apples because with XP some graphics settings are blended into the Visual Effects slider. I prefer how MSFS has made them much more granular. You can make some very nice visuals in MSFS, but I struggle to get XP looking as good with their current lighting.
All simulators try to show things as close to reality as possible, not only XP. And I’d like to end the discussion about it, because this question - and this forum - is about MSFS, not XP, and this topic is not about comparison between the two.
Some nice real life/sim dusk images in this thread, so I thought I’d post a sunrise video here, in case anyone wants to see an example of the sky colours changing over time.
