Night Lighting, Stars and Visibility

[roadrabbit]

I am currently flying an old Avro York online from London, England, to Johannesburg, South Africa - a trip I did in 1948 as a very young passenger. I am currently stuck on the ground i Cairo as my computer guru tries to find me a new graphics card, as mine has gone belly up. (darn you, you cryptocurrency miners, you!).

 

It enables me to enquire whether it is possible to reset the night sky to a darker hue? At the same time I would like to brighten (and possibly enlarge - but only slightly!) the stars and planets in the night sky. As someone who used to fly regularly over the "dark continent" for a living, I find the reproduction too bright and the stars etc too indistinct. It was only after much looking that I became aware that the night sky actually shows real star positions (if I am wrong about this, it would explain the accuracy of my astro-navigation back in the day!).

 

Any and all help much appreciated.

[Dusterman]

As Shakespeare would have said were he a modern playwright, "The fault, dear roadrabbit, is not in our stars, but in our monitors."  All monitors have a black level, which is the lowest amount of light emitted from the screen when the software calls for absolute black.  Except for OLED and similar displays which turn on each pixel individually, the screen backlighting will cause a glow on black pixels.  For the same reason (screen backlighting) stars and planets are globs instead of lighted individual pixels.  If your monitor has a capability for calibration, you can calibrate it for the lowest possible black level.  If not you have to live with the factory black level settings.  I use calibrated high end monitors for one of my setups which have very low black levels, but you can still see a glow in a dark room when you make the screens absolute black.

[teecee]

Got to admit though, it would be fabulous to see a more realistic starscape in the sim..Teecee.

[roadrabbit]

Thanks Dusterman,

 

I shall try calibarting the monotor and see what I can get 

 

[Meerkat]

Hi teecee - did you try this one? My adjusted stars.dat from an older thread on stars

[Fizzelle]

On 02/04/2018 at 12:22 AM, Dusterman said:

As Shakespeare would have said were he a modern playwright, "The fault, dear roadrabbit, is not in our stars, but in our monitors."  All monitors have a black level, which is the lowest amount of light emitted from the screen when the software calls for absolute black.  Except for OLED and similar displays which turn on each pixel individually, the screen backlighting will cause a glow on black pixels.  For the same reason (screen backlighting) stars and planets are globs instead of lighted individual pixels.  If your monitor has a capability for calibration, you can calibrate it for the lowest possible black level.  If not you have to live with the factory black level settings.  I use calibrated high end monitors for one of my setups which have very low black levels, but you can still see a glow in a dark room when you make the screens absolute black.

 

Ah of course, that explains why the astronauts couldn't see the stars from the moon or the capsule in space - they didn't have LED monitors back then and the ones they did use for TV and photos obviously weren't "calibarted" properly. The penny drops...

[Rodneyprice]

Try the following

firstly go to control panel in windows 10 and look for icon that says file explorer options , within that you will have an option up the top change to view then scroll down to see show hidden folders and drives and then tick that option ,

Go back to C: drive or what ever driver letter your windows is installed on.

Look for Program Data and open that folder.

look for Lockheed Martin and open that folder.

Prepar 3D v4  open that folder.

you will then see a DAT file  titled stars.dat.

open that using  notepad. 

Part the way down you will see star settings and number of stars.

I think it reads 9068 

I changed mine to 0  as I don't like the star displays in P3D , they look false.  (Maybe ORBX could design a star scenery pack) 

Enter what ever number you require and save.

there is also options to change intensity of stars and display constellations if you decide to keep all stars or some.

Let me know how you go.

PS: do remember to make a back up copy of that star.dat file just in case.