I recently picked up the hobby of astronomy, and was just wondering how accurate the star placement was, I've noticed the constellation of Taurus, but seeing how I fly all over the world, never staying with one route very long I don't know how well they are placed. Anyone else know?

hi,Use this:"AutoStar is a program that allows new features to be added to the night sky. It adds the brighter planets in the correct position for any date. Optionally it can add comets, images or user objects such as a lunar eclipse or Messier objects. The program can import the SAO star catalogue, thus allowing the number of background stars to be significantly increased". available in the Avsim library (autostarx.zip).In addition, it looks greatThere is also a sextant available dc3_bbsx.zip coupled with dc3_bbsxa.zip. It was designed for FS2004 but it works fine with FSX. Hope this helps

+1 for Autostar.I would rank it in my top 5 for freeware utilities. Its pretty cool to look out my window and see Orion directly at the top of the sky, then fire up FSX, load a flight from the nearest airport to me and see Orion in the same spot, as well as the planets. Which reminds me that I need to rerun it to update my planet positions.

Was compelled to use this software, however when installing and attempting to run. I get the compatibility error, this program needs MSVBVM50.DLL to run. Running Win 7 x64. Can I just copy this file into my System32 folder?[Edit] Adding the said file to the same folder the exe is in works just fine.

+1 for Autostar.I would rank it in my top 5 for freeware utilities. Its pretty cool to look out my window and see Orion directly at the top of the sky, then fire up FSX, load a flight from the nearest airport to me and see Orion in the same spot, as well as the planets. Which reminds me that I need to rerun it to update my planet positions.

I update before every flight. Its one of my pre-flight checklist items.Oh btw and a little of topic..But I forgot to get back to you on this. I did try that florida landings and disabled it. It looked just a little too comic bookishwith the colors and it was a little stuttery, but I might give it a shot again after running the fsx.cg online tweak. It did seem to improve some performance here.

How Is it, that my planets look like blocks? They are not round?

Hi,Reduce Planet Size in Auto StarX.

Thanks Jim, That worked.

Oh btw and a little of topic..But I forgot to get back to you on this. I did try that florida landings and disabled it. It looked just a little too comic bookishwith the colors and it was a little stuttery, but I might give it a shot again after running the fsx.cg online tweak. It did seem to improve some performance here.

Thanks for the update on the Dave, I had forgotten all about it. Perhaps when you get your cfg squared away you could post some screens of it.

Try putting a copy of the new stars.dat in your main FSX directory and in C:\FSX folder. Make sure to make a backup of the original first. I was having problems with the stars not appearing and this combination worked for me. (I'm sure it's probably not needed in both, but I'm not touching it now that it's working!) ;)