If you open the stars.dat file with an editor you will find the following:=================[star Settings]Intensity=220NumStars=200000Constellations=1[Constellations];Big dipperConstellation.0 = 509,497,483,456,447,416,417,456=================Now my question is, how do you add more constellations / galaxies because they are very prominent if you fly at night over a remote area with no ground lights?I've played around with the autostar.zip file that's available on AVSIM but there is no setting for this.It will be nice to fly at night and see those dense "clouds" of constellations or millions of stars when you look up. At the moment with the autostar settings it only creats 9175 stars and I promise you if you fly over the Sahara or Namib desert you will see see many many much more!RegardsTerblanche

"the autostar settings it only creats 9175 stars and I promise you if you fly over the Sahara or Namib desert you will see see many many much more!"----------------Well I assume this is for the whole sky in all directions so at any location this will be cut in half by the horizon. Actually even this number (4583) is probably higher than even most viewer's with eyes fully dark-adapted in the best light-pollution free zone would see at any time which would be more like a couple thousand. Of course as you go higher in altitude you have less of earth's atmosphere obscuring fainter stars so the number might be up to that number you quoted. The real night sky looks much better since FS2004 stars are unimpressive dots and I don't find there is as much difference between faint stars and bright ones (since I know the constellations at least from my latitude , I can see the difference between reality and what as shown in FS2004). I think if stars which were brighter were a little bigger it would help show the brighter ones better. Also atmospheric conditions can cause a star (the light from which is essentially a pure dot without real width from our point of view) to to have small glows around them which can make themlook more impressive in reality . Adding more naked eye stars would really be unrealistic but I wish there was a way to make the "real stars" in FS2004 look better.As far as galaxies are concerned there is of course our own (Milky Way" which woud be nice as a hazy band in FS2004. Other than that there are the Large and Small Magellanic clouds (two small irregular galaxies near our own) viewable from more southern locations ( most of us in the northern latitudes would never see them).Other than those examples , the only one that comes to mind is the Andromeda Galaxy ( about 3 million light years distant making it usually considered the most distant thing viewable to the naked eye ... excepting some reports of some people seeing a couple other galaxies to the naked eye) in the constellation Andromeda ( M31) which is viewable to the naked eye on really dark skies away from cities and after your eye's have become dark-dapted (ie , pupils expand after some time without bright light exposure). So really, showing galaxies other than those (and M31 is really fainter than most people could see most times) to the naked eye is just not realistic.

Agreed, but as for constellations, it would be nice to see those that are applicable. Does the sky in FS 'move', or is it static and it's only the moon that moves around? If the background nightsky DOES move, then surely it would be possible to have Orion, Leo, etc, appearing in their correct positions at the correct times!

Yes, the stars certainly do move with time. The stars are quite accurately placed for any location, date and time. You can try a neat trick to illustrate this. Select slew mode (so you don't have to worry about flying), and time and direction so it's night and you're looking north toward the Pole star. Select time acceleration of 32X or greater. Now you'll see the stars steadily rotating like a giant wheel. Best regards, Chris

Hi Terblanche, AutoStar does not increase the number of visible stars, but it does of course add the brighter planets. The obvious method to increase the number of stars is to use RealStars - but as AutoStar indicates about 9000 stars then you're probably already using it. You probably can use AutoStar to add a bright galaxy such as M31. The program can display a bitmap image among the stars (the zip includes a Christmas image). It would be quite easy to create a bitmap that shows M31 and display it in FS. If you place the galaxy at the centre of the bitmap and enter the correct coordinates then the galaxy should appear in the correct position among the stars. You could extend this by stretching the bitmap over all or a large part of the sky. You could then show several galaxies and nebulae. I would mention that I haven't tried this so you would be in unknown territory. But if there were problems I'd be happy to help, maybe with an update of AutoStar. However, there's one MAJOR problem I can't do much about. For reasons best known to themselves, Microsoft crippled the stars display. Although the hardware has a brightness dynamic range effectively of 256:1, the star brightness in FS is limited to a ridiculous 3:1. That's right, the brightest star is only about 3 times brighter than the faintest star. Because of this, the image display generated by AutoStar is relatively crude. I hope Microsoft fix this unnecessary limitation in the next release. Best regards, Chris

>The real night sky looks much better since FS2004 stars are>unimpressive dots and I don't find there is as much difference>between faint stars and bright ones (since I know the>constellations at least from my latitude , I can see the>difference between reality and what as shown in FS2004).......You're absolutely right. To someone familiar with the night sky the FS stars are very unrealistic. I did some measurements and found that the brightness dynamic range is just 3:1, which is hopeless. I think I can guess why Microsoft did this - but they were wrong. I really hope they do something about this in the next release, particularly if they take 'as real as it gets' seriously. And while they're about it, how about adding colour? If it affected frame rates it could of course be optional. If FS10 provided stars with 16 / 24 bit colour then we could have some very beautiful - and realistic! - star displays. And AutoStar's image / comet image capabilities would really come into their own! Best regards, Chris

"the star brightness in FS is limited to a ridiculous 3:1. That's right, the brightest star is only about 3 times brighter than the faintest star."------------This makes seeing the constellations in FS2004 (when you know them in the real life sky) more difficult. All these stars which are much fainter in reality are just too obvious while the brighter ones are to similar to all those faint ones.Adding colour would be neat but I'd be afraid it would be overdone (ie, really strong colours all over the sky). Apart from some of the most obviously coloured ones (eg , Antares in Scorpius ... from a Greek name meaning 'rival of Mars' due to it's orange hue it was similar to the Greeks' Ares or the Romans' Mars ) most stars don't appear to have much colour variation to the naked eye (but there is some and the effect between all of them might be one slight thing that is missing too) as they are so faint the eye's colour receptors don't register them much.

It would be nice if the colours were included in the stars.dat file. On the assumption that Microsoft would probably get the colours wrong, it would then be possible to correct the colours by editing the file. There might then be an add-on called ExtremelyRealStars, that corrects the colours as well as adding extra stars! On the subject of Microsoft getting the stars wrong, there's something I forgot to mention. When I looked into the brightness limitation problem, I found something else. The actual brightnesses, as well as being limited to 3:1, were approximately proportional to the magnitude values, which is completely wrong. Clearly the programmer who did this knew little about astronomy. We should be grateful that he at least knew that the larger the magnitude value, the fainter the star. Of course, magnitudes are an exponential (or logarithmic) scale, so a change of one magnitude represents a brightness factor of about 2.5, while a change of 5 magnitudes represents a brightness factor of about 100. This also distorts the portrayal of star brightnesses, although the 3:1 limit is probably the biggest factor. It's a shame, but the star brightnesses in FS9 are a complete mess. It would be so easy to make it realistic. I really must shoot off an email about this to 'tell Microsoft', or whatever it's called! Best regards, Chris