man, you party too muchhave you fed the mice?:-lolhave a great day!(or whatever's left of it)ciaovilk

Knowing Scott, he probably ate the mice's lunch!:>

They weren't hungry...

sounds more like he drank the mice's slightly fermented barley water ;-)

I found a replacement stars.dat file at http://b314clipper.com/ in their support-downloads section. It adds an enormous amount of stars, accurately positioned in FS, but no planets. Their file is much more elegantly laid out, however:Star.6=7, 05,14,32.2, -08,12,06, 0.12; BE ORIStar 6 is located at a right ascension of 5h 14m 32.2s, declination -8d 12m 6s with a brightness of magnitude 0.12 - the comment defines it as beta orion.Orbital data for planets and comets is freely available on the web, a utility could compute current positions (or based on a manually entered date) and add those to the stars.dat file.Current data for planets can be found here:http://www.galaxies.com/avantgo/planets.aspFor example:VENUSCurrent Information May 5 2004Phase 25% Angular Size: 39.07 sec of arc RA Position: 5 hr 29 min DEC Position: 27

.....and what about rainbows? Anyone know a good addon, man? :-cool

damn, do i take my fermented barley water back gladly!you have discovered something... kooooool:-cool

I'm sure there was one for an earlier version of FS. I'll do some digging on my system and CDs see if I can find anything but hope someone else beats me to it :-)

Always happy to share!

It was stars_dat.zip for fs2002 by J. Chuang. Also works in FS9. Only had 4995 stars, vs 9095 in real_stars. It was a big improvement over the default, I've been using up till this point, I think I like the real_stars better. Thanks for the link.And the stupid question. How did MS do the moon. It isnt in stars.dat, is it? Couldn't the same thing be done for planets?

I released a program called AutoStar just before Christmas. It does exactly what you ask for! I also wanted to add comets as a standard feature, but sadly Microsoft limited the dynamic range of stars so that the brightest is only about 3 times brighter than the faintest. This makes an accurate portrayal of comets nearly impossible. The program allows you to add an image to the stars so you could experiment with comets by drawing a comet image. Have fun. Best regards, Chris Here's my original post:Note: when I uploaded the files the system changed part of the names to upper case - the forum may not recognise upper case. If so you can see the screenshots by copying and pasting the links into your browser.****************************************************************** AutoStar is a program that can be used to customise the Flight Simulator stars display in several ways:1. Adds the planets for any specified date.2. You can add a label for each planet for easy identification.3. Optionally displays the sideral circles.4. Optionally displays an image or message in the stars.By simply displaying the planets without labels it increases the realism of the Flight Simulator night sky a little bit more. It also works with the (highly recommended) RealStars add-on.Mars will be in the news over Christmas and the new year as three spacecraft/landers will be arriving there. The Beagle 2 Mars lander is British-built, so I have my fingers crossed! You can use AutoStar to locate Mars in Flight Simulator. If you go outside you should see Mars in the same position as in FS.Some seasonal screenshots:http://www.kline.demon.co.ukAS_1.JPGhttp://www.kline.demon.co.ukAS_2.JPGhttp://www.kline.demon.co.ukAS_3.JPGThis shows the planetary grouping of 13th May, 2002. Of course, you can switch off the labels and circles.http://www.kline.demon.co.ukAS_4.JPGHave fun - and happy Christmas! You can get AutoStar here:http://www.kline.demon.co.uk/autostar.zip

That is simply fabulous! How'd that one get by me?Downloading now...and thanks a ton!Best,sg

I just wanted to bump this thread again, as I find the combination of real_stars from the clipper site and your utility to be just what the doctor ordered!Thanks a ton for this great utility!Are you continuing it's development, Chris? In your attempts to show comets, did you try using the picture BMP to show a comet icon as an approximation? That's something I'm going to try, just to see how it looks...Also, I don't know how difficult it would be to add a command line mode, so that the program could be started by Ken's FSAutostart utility, and automatically update the stars.dat file using the current system date and default config settings and exit without any user input. Just some thoughts.Again, thank you for this excellent contribution!Best,sg

Hello sg, I'm glad you like it. I think it probably was overlooked when I released it. There was only one reply (though a nice one). I released it just before Christmas - maybe everyone was too busy buying Christmas prezzies! I thought about possible improvements and one was along the lines you suggested. It would be quite easy to add an auto-run mode. You would run AutoStar - it would then read the system clock, add the stars as per the settings and then run Flight Simulator and exit. I haven't used Ken's program, but if it could be set up to call AutoStar instead of Flight Simulator then it would do the whole business. Ken's program would call AutoStar which in turn would call FS. I may look at making a new version of AutoStar, though my day job and also developing AutoAsm keeps me quite busy! If you or anyone else have any ideas, please let me know. As I said, the restricted dynamic range of the FS stars severely limits the quality of images projected with the stars. Some time I'll get around to sending my suggestions to Microsoft for the next version. Getting rid of the dynamic range limit will be near the top of the list. Apart from making realistic comets possible, it would make the stars themselves look a lot more realistic. Best regards, Chris

In re: FSAutoStart - if you set it to call AutoStar instead of MSFS - if AutoStar exits immediately after launching MSFS, then FSAutoStart would detect this and start re-starting all the services and programs.However, I put a workaround for this in FSAutoStart. In the readme file there is a Q+A section, and the first question is how to get a program called SplashScreen to work. SplashScreen launches MSFS in the same way AutoStar would, so if you follow the directions I specify, AutoStar will work also.I'm glad to see this post, now I can get AutoStar! I missed it too, and would love to see the planets in the sky! Thanks Chris!