Has anyone noticed the stars in this sim?
Not only are they accurate when checked against Skywatch, the appropriately flip in the Southern skies. eg The Orion and Southern Cross Constellations below. It’s nice having Orion the ‘right’ way up 
noice!
looks cool cant wait to fly in VR and see the stars
I really like the stars in the sim.
With nVidia cards, you can use the GeForce experience panel and play with the exposure filter in order to see the stars as if each frame had been taken with a very long exposure, it isn’t natural but it is a lot of fun, some expensive color camera can do that IRL (such as the x27 night camera for cinema).
I made a video to demonstrate this feature, the presence of stars is useful in order to add visual references during areobatics:
(sorry for the cheesy free music)
With GeForce experience you can also capture raw HDR screenshots and treat them as you would do with real raw night pictures. It is a great feature for photographers willing to preview a shot or a timelapse at a given location.
Here is an example of what a raw 32 bit capture from the sim can give you:
I’m glad someone else noticed this 
Compared to FSX’s night sky MSFS is utterly amazing. The first night flight I did I passed the upper cloud layer and was presented with Taurus straight ahead. I thought WTF…seriously!? So I went outside and scanned around to check and, sure enough, there was Orion, Ursa Major, etc. Blew me away I can tell you. Went down under on my next flight to see their skies, as I’ve never been south of the Equator IRL.
hehe, go into your time settings, and drag the time around a couple of months, you’ll see the constellations moving in the sky.
Yep did a good job. Also earth shadow done well
I tried setting up a total solar eclipse, using some known historical dates, locations, and times. Underwhelming, but it still occured. As someone with an interest in astronomy, I’m glad to see the correct night sky in the sim.
My other hobby is astrophotography (https://www.flickr.com/photos/crunchmeister/), so needless to say, I noticed the night sky immediately. And I’m quite impressed with what I see.
Looking at the amazing pictures on your flickr account I thought: live northern lights auroras would be the cherry on the cake…
Non permanent objects such as the wonderful comet “F3 Neowise” easily visible to the naked eye this summer would also be sweet.
I do wish they modeled light pollution though. It’s a well-studied aspect to night sky viewing and there is plenty of available reference as to the quality of night sky across the world that MSFS could use rather than trying to calculate it in the game
Much of the visible effect of light pollution is due to aerosol density in the air and how it scatters light. It tends to be worse over large urban centres, which scatters light more and makes the sky less visible.
Currently, that’s not really a thing in MSFS, so it would be very difficult to model that in a realistic manner. I’m sure that once (/ if) aerosol density is properly modelled it will add a lot to the effects of light pollution.
it is surprising for people who pay attention to the skies, or even use them for their personal orientation… and then you change north/south of the equator. Not only doe sit really screw with your sense of direction, but inverted constellations also seems very very off
turns out it was a good night to be watching the skies… a record close near mise. 4m rock grazed us 400km over the South Pacific. We spotted it… afterwards!
Shout outout to our first line of defence in Hawaii… thanks for your work, but we need more scopes on duty!!
and of course, one of my early flights…
That’s truly awesome. I love the fact that Asobo just did this, didn’t tell anyone really, and it is just there for us all to enjoy.
Was this the trailer truck sized asteroid that was supposed to possibly hit us just in time for the election?
You have a lot of great images on your astronomy site, thanks for sharing. I’m mostly doing photometry now, but my out of date site is www.spotastro.com.
Best,
Mark
Thanks for sharing!!
And I thought I had a lot of money invested in my equipment. lol
Truly outstanding setup and mind-blowingly awesome images you’ve produced with those big light buckets. Well done, good sir.
my family is happy that flight simulation, as equipment intensive as it is, isn’t quite as bad.
The expensive hardware for MSFS has eaten into my astro budget this year Still I’ve spent more on astro cameras and filters somehow…
Stay away from astronomy if you know what’s good for your wallet.
Indeed. It’s a bottomless pit. Just popped $4K CDN on an Esprit 100 a month ago. Now eyeing up a mono camera + filter wheel + 2" 3nm narrowband filters.
