Stars in sky not realistic

When I look to the sky at night, I can see that the sky looks like a very bad print of the sky. The stars do not bright…it is like a picture in low resolution…
It is only in my sim? How could I have a better night sky?

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It’s just the resolution of the texture they use for the night sky. This has been an issue in video games since forever as wrapping a texture across an entire sky sphere causes it to get stretched a lot. The fix is to significantly increase the texture resolution, but that might cause an unacceptable hit on the performance. It might be a possible for a third party mod to attempt this if that texture is accessible.

Compared to most other games out there, they’ve done a great job. The movement of the stars are accurate and match the seasons. And you see the sky at different latitudes as you would IRL. The motion of the moon and its phases are also spot on.

The lack of planets is a bummer, but I can deal with it. Turn up your resolution and it sharpens right up.

It’s not perfect, but it’s about the best you can find in any game or simulator out there atm.

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Looks great to me in my 55 in 4K TV monitor. I love the night sky in the sim.

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It looks great to me unless I have my gamma or brightness is uncalibrated, then it does look pretty awful. I wouldn’t call that Asobo’s problem though. There is no way they are going to render the stars in 3d so bad calibration (or maybe bad monitors) is less of an issue.

I just use the defaults and have no issues in HDR or non-HDR modes.

As for stretching, it didn’t sounds like the OP was complaining about that.

In certain other games (Arma, Sailing Simulator, etc) you can use the night sky to navigate. Not so much of a concern in a flight sim as, by the time you figure out where you are you’ve flown 30 miles anyway.

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I have two problems with the night sky:

  • Stars are big, soft spots when you zoom in - they should stay at tiny spots (effect of the sky being a texture I guess)
  • Night sky is too bright, stars are too visible (especially around dawn/dusk) and are seen all the way down to the horizon even when on the ground - very little in the way of atmosphere getting in the way. (Disclaimer: my old TN panel is a bit brighter than average but I have played a lot of other games at night including DCS, Arma 3, Silent Hunter 3 & 5, and never found the night sky so dazzlingly full of stars.

It’s great aside from that :slight_smile:

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I find the star constellations perfect

here is the plough

here is Orion

if they dont live up to your expectations leave the room where your monitor is and look up at the night sky

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Hmmmm…in your opinion…but I bet you can navigate by them if you knew how…can anyone confirm? That would seem pretty realistic to me if thats the case for a simulator. Honestly, I think we need to start picking our battles as a community…some of the whims are a little…aside to the overall concept of a “flight sim”

Yes, you can navigate by them. I have checked them against the real sky (when I was seeing if Asobo modeled the planets in the sky (they didn’t).

Yes I do know how to navigate by the stars…in a boat\ship

  1. As somebody said, these are not vector objects. As Asobo has said, the night sky is a bit map. The dots are what they are in the resolution of the bitmap.

  2. They’ve also talked about the stars being “too bright”. They don’t currently model ambient light from the ground, or the dust/water droplets in the air. The stars are the correct brightness, you’re just used to the night sky where you live with ambient light. Go to the Grand Canyon sometime or similar location where it’s very dry and there’s no ambient light in the area. The stars are pretty bright to the naked eye when there’s no ambient ground light.

Absolutely

I don’t think anyone questioned whether or not you knew how to navigate by the stars.

There’s no difference in navigating by the stars in a boat / ship vs an airplane. The military still teaches how to use an octant, and I read in another thread most long distance planes still have an octant port, such as the KC-135 and Boeing 747. Several users piped in with stories about those ports…

thanks I did’nt know that Octants where used in planes…always happy to learn …I still have mine for only sea navigation…

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https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/pan-american-airways-clippers/357865/10

wow that’s amazing…wonderful piece of erudite information thank you

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Back in the pre-pandemic days, I would give monthly public night sky tours at our local dark sky site about an hour out of town. We organized these sessions 2 night / month on the weekend of the new moon, to give folks the best views of the sky. The site is a Bortle Class 2 - darkness that few people living near populated areas ever experience. I can guarantee you that stars are very bright indeed.

Having been into amateur astronomy for the past 22 years and astrophotography for the last 8 years, I know my way around the sky pretty well. And on a clear night with stable atmosphere and no haze, I can easily get lost in the number of stars visible. and have to search to find even familiar constellations. amongst the thousands of visible stars. And yes, even stars that would be small and dim from a less dark location are highly visible.

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beautiful that you are doing that hopefully you can return to that once were through the pandemic

Thank you. I hope to get back to it as well. Although I guess in a way it was nice to have this past summer off. It allowed me to spend the time I’d be giving those tours photographing the sky instead.

In case anyone is interested, you can click on the image below to check out my photos…

Imgur
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