Solar eclipse

A solar eclipse is shown in the game (example 03.09.2081 Southern Germany), but it remains bright, which is not the case in real life.

Yes please.

“Partial solar eclipse” depicted in the sim (my location is near Piedra del Aguila, Neuquen (Argentina))

Note: This should have been depicted as a total solar eclipse (that will indeed happen on Dec 14, 2020 at noon local time), it was so close though!

I tried going up and down on latitude but I couldn’t find the totality, only partial eclipses.
Is this a problem with the virtual position of the Sun / Moon in the sim? or the virtual depiction of the Earth that doesn’t allow for this event to happen?

What do you think?



Today I couldn’t see Eclipse at Valcheta at given time :frowning:

Totally not total. I tried the same thing for the one in 2017. I guess I have to use Celestria for my astronomy dabbling.

Well, I think it would be a good point to have a good simulation of the sky. Ultimately, this is where we fly. It would be great to be able to fly under an eclipse and watch the lighting go down or watch a lunar eclipse and watch the Moon turn red. It would not be bad to have those details, which would mark a higher level of realism in the simulator.

The partial eclipse was also visible in the sim from the UK. Go to any date and time and eclipse occurred on earth and its visible everywhere. Presumably they allowed them for a reason so surely something is broken?

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I was flying in Arizona earlier and was surprised to see a solar eclipse. It shouldn’t have been visible from the US, so I guess that the moon mechanics are almost, but not quite perfect meaning that the eclipse shows up in slightly the wrong place. But still, very impressed it was there at all!

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We totally need solar eclipse simulation in MSFS :smiley:
I’d be hunting them all year long.

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From what I remembner, solar eclipse does get simulated in the sim. I saw some screenshots that the sun was blocked by the moon during it. But it doesn’t simulate the sunlight rays and the moon shadow.

It also doesn’t simulate lunar eclipses.

Yes I know that it does simulate eclipses somehow but would be great to also have short period of darkness like this one above.

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Saw this on June 10th Its an annular eclipse.

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It works and it’s not a challenge to find one. Below deep partial cover will occur in Portland Oregon on oct 14 2023. Watch out with the online times you have to fiddle with the time. In this case, the MSFS moon hits the sun on the other side
 and it is off about 2 hours


Zoom it in

but its all about simulating darkness period during eclipse. As you can see there is no change in amount of light during eclipse.

I’ve tried several. I think the cover is inaccurate. Angle does not match. Yesterday I did july 2 2019 on the coast of Chile. Supposed to be a full eclipse, but there was no time of day it was actually complete. Nice thing about it
 that eclipse was still going on at sunset.

I’ve seen only partial eclipses sofar. When it is full, there should be a darkening effect. When a light (like the sun) is covered in 3d graphics, it will have less environment lighting effect. In the RW you also hardly notice a partial eclipse, except when you’re prepared to look directly into the sun.

It’s basically easily to notice once sun coverage exceeds 80%. It becomes grayish like during OVC cloud layer but it is sunny. Meaning there is easy way to tell that something is happening. Other thing is that even finding total solar eclipse and setting it up in simulator it shows no full sun coverage it is still something about 50-70%. There should be at least slight difference in lighting but none of this is present.

I wonder if this could be achieved with a third party add-on that creates a shadow casting moon object.

I suggest it as an add-on because, to be honest, I think realistic total solar eclipse lighting is well outside the scope of the base game. We don’t even have decent cirrus clouds yet, control over IMC visibility, or realistic icing. Not saying they can’t work on lots of stuff at the same time, but there are lots of things that need to come first.

Interesing question
 what would be realistic ? If you’d really like to know, you’d have to compare two screenshots and count up the pixel values. If I consider my own experience with eclipses (and I’ve seen quite some) you hardly notice any effect on daylight, unless the eclipse is total, or near total.

There is some actual measurement (data, lux) here

Well doing stuff that you have mentioned is quite complex. We have eclipses implemented. At least to the point where simulator calculates relative position of moon to sun to have these eclipses happening at certain places all over the world. I guess there is already quite good foundary to have it coded into game engine - now it looks like we ‘only’ need shadow. ‘Only’ - because it is probably way more complex than it seems.

Even If we dont have darkening effect of partial solar eclipse - please look few post above to see gif I’ve pasted here yesterday. Wouldn’t be so awesome to have that in simulator?