After almost 3,000 hours in the sim, I can't stop noticing the entire galaxy that is visible every night, whether the moon is out or not.
I will attach some screenshots of real night skies and the night sky in the sim, although I am sure we all know what they look like
Looking at the first screenshot, it is clear that even the most distant and ‘smaller’ stars are fully visible at night.
It looks as if Asobo has turned down the brightness of the sky when the moon is not out in SU14 which is a start, but when we bring the moon out, it gets really bad.
It is quite easy to see that the texture of the night sky is just one giant image stretched around the world (literally). This results in this not-too-realistic, bright night sky that makes it look like we are on the edge of space with the James Webb telescope.
This second screenshot was taken with the Moon shining brightly, creating a much brighter nighttime environment as we can see. This brings out the Milky Way and makes the smaller and more distant stars appear even brighter.
Unfortunately, there also seems to be no effect of light pollution, as the texture looks the same in both the city and the countryside, as it is, of course, an image texture.
Now let’s take a look at these conditions at night time in the real world:
This image, taken from Tumblr, shows how the moon can be out with no stars visible other than the planets next to the moon.
Now, the same effect is shown in this picture, which I took during a nice holiday in Malaga, showing the beautiful night sky.
And here, the flight to Malaga. Showing the dusk environment with no starts showing, which is not the case in MSFS
Now I just wanted to come here and post this to shed some light on this problem, which tends to be quite unrealistic and doesn’t create a true sense of a real night environment as it could be achieved (which has been achieved in other sims such as xp12), and possibly get something new in MSFS2024.