So I’m enjoying a nice little night flight in the C172 when I thought “I forgot to see if the colours of the stars in MSFS are accurate”.
They are! It really is awesome. It doesn’t seem to have the planets which isn’t surprising because it would require extra CPU cycles to do the orbits that very few people care about.
■■■■ nice.
courtesy of some reddit user:
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It seems like it is moving though
Interesting, there is/was another thread in wishlist or bugs about this. I’ve looked in game and when I remove all points of reference other than the sky when I’m airborne I can’t discern any movement at all.
Reddit posters have claimed the stars shown are what you would see from that location on the earth at that time and is accurate. So they must move with the planet. I have not checked myself, so i cant say, it didnt seem to impact my game either way unless this game implements Orbital mechanics.
Well if they’ve looked at it then I’m probably wrong. Post retracted.
Stop spreading misinformation, this is not true at all.
I would like to see a light pollution map overlaid. not all stars are visible from bright cities usually just the few brightest.
Does the light pollution reflect off clouds currently? Ill have to check next time i play.
Yes, it does.
The stars are great and their position / colour is spot on.
Buuuut you can see WAY too many. The average human can see down to magnitude 6 in perfect conditions. In game you can see stars down to at least magnitude 9, and possibly higher. (EDIT: For star brightness, a higher magnitude is dimmer. The brightest stars and planets have a negative magnitude, ie very bright.) That’s stars that are 1000 times dimmer than you should be able to see at the edge of the human eye’s capabilities.
Also a full moon would dazzle out half the night sky other than the very brightest stars and planets in RL.
This actually makes it much harder to find your bearings using the stars as in RL you would be looking for say the triangle and box of pegasus but in game it stands out less because you can see all the dim stars that you cant see in RL.
Pleiades and the Plough, and to some degree the Summer triangle (Cygnus, Lyra and Aquila) are all pretty easy to spot though which in itself is impressive.
I know most won’t care, but as an amateur astronomer it triggers me haha.
From my house in the Canary Islands I can see the milky way during clear nights, thousands of stars at the same time.
Once you get away from the light pollution of big cities you can see all the stars you want, just turn off the plane lights before.
Oh I’ve been to dark spots. I had a 10" dobsonian scope at the time and the difference between what you can see with your naked eye and what you can see with any sort of astro binos is stark. I can see the milky way from my garden most clear nights (Naked eye).
The point is that in perfect viewing conditions, the average human can see down to ~6 mag. In the game you can see far, far dimmer stars than that even in imperfect (ie full moon, asmospheric disturbance, declination (angle) of viewing, direction of viewing etc) than even people with the best low light vision.
It’s not a complaint, and it wouldn’t bother me if it never got changed. I hope a talented modder that is also an astronerd might take up the cause though 
I would really love to see the planets modeled though. Maybe one day…I’ll take bug fixes over planets for now.
agree, too many stars
If you guys haven’t tried it yet, change the exposure settings on your drone cam when you’re at some scenic locations at night. The whole night sky comes alive. And likewise, if you set the time, date, and location for an eclipse you can decrease the exposure to darken the sky and see the moon block out the sun’s disc. The camera controls actually let you do some real photography work in this game, which is pretty amazing and a lot of fun.
Color shouldn’t be terribly hard because I believe it’s just a photo texture mapped to a sky sphere/dome. Once the rotation of the Earth is modeled, the star positions are in the bag too.
Planets shouldn’t be a hit on performance either. You’re just adding a few spots to the sky sphere and the sim could get away with calculating the position only once at load time.
I think part of this is due to the atmosphere being too clear, which affects multiple aspects of the game and its realism. Mist and haze don’t seem to be fully or properly implemented.
Ooooh nice tip on the dronecam @SkipTalbot. Cheers!
I’m an astrophotographer and amateur astronomer (https://www.flickr.com/photos/crunchmeister/). I can vouch for the accuracy of the night sky in MSFS in terms of positions of stars. Colours seem pretty accurate for the most part as well. I haven’t looked at that in detail, but the bright, stand-out stars like Vega, Arcturus, Spica, etc seem pretty good to me.
What isn’t accurate is the light pollution. I shouldn’t be able to see any more than 5-10 stars (depending on the season) when sitting on the tarmac in Toronto. Nor should I be able to see a full field of stars under a full moon.
But I’ll still give them kudos for having an accurate model of the sky with everything at its correct position and varying based on what latitude it’s viewed from.
If you increase the aerosol density, the glare from the moon will blot out most of the stars. It seems that with Live Weather, this setting is always set to its lowest, resulting in unrealistically clear skies.
