The night sky in FSX Demo is breathtaking with its blackness and number of stars - but Milky Way? The Milky Way is visible here as if it was a Hubble telescope imagery :-lol. If you can get far from populated areas what you can see with a naked eye is a very faint and thin silvery streak - not this huge purple gaseous nebulae with its tentacles spreading everywhere and occupying significant portion of the sky. I pray it will corrected since it ruins otherwise very fine night environment.Michael J.http://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/for...argo_hauler.gifhttp://sales.hifisim.com/pub-download/asv6-banner-beta.jpg

>The night sky in FSX Demo is breathtaking with its blackness>and number of stars - but Milky Way? The Milky Way is visible>here as if it was a Hubble telescope imagery :-lol. If you can>get far from populated areas what you can see with a naked eye>is a very faint and thin silvery streak - not this huge purple>gaseous nebulae with its tentacles spreading everywhere and>occupying significant portion of the sky. I pray it will>corrected since it ruins otherwise very fine night>environment.>>Michael J.Haven't we done this already in here?Also, I can't say what it's like from the runways in St. Marteen, but at a farm on a hill in Viewtown, Virginia, it is very noticable at night. I don't think it's quite that distinct, but it is certainly not "a very faint and thin silvery streak" like you said.

>Haven't we done this already in here?>Indeed. I should have checked.Michael J.http://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/for...argo_hauler.gifhttp://sales.hifisim.com/pub-download/asv6-banner-beta.jpg

I don't know what you are referring to but it's not the Milky Way but possibly the Andromeda Galaxy. We live in the Milky Way, it's our galaxy. The Andromeda is one of the nearest galaxies to our Milky way and appears similar to a star with the naked eye. As you said it or any of the galaxies near us shouldn't look like a nebulae only like a star if visible at all.Regards, Carlos

EDIT: Sorry, meant to do plain text.>I don't know what you are referring to but it's not the Milky>Way but possibly the Andromeda Galaxy. We live in the Milky>Way, it's our galaxy. The Andromeda is one of the nearest>galaxies to our Milky way and appears similar to a star with>the naked eye. As you said it or any of the galaxies near us>shouldn't look like a nebulae only like a star if visible at>all.>>Regards, CarlosNo, he is referring to the Milky Way.At night, in a clear area free of light pollution, the band of our galaxy is visible. M31 (Andromeda) is also visible, being one of the few items outside our galaxy that can be without a telescope.From the Cornell University astronomy site:"On a clear night we can see the band of the Milky Way in the sky, the fuzzy light that stretches from one horizon to the other. This band of light is made up of a vast number of stars that telescopes can pick out as individuals but our eyes cannot. This is our view of the billions of stars that make up the disk of our galaxy, from a viewpoint inside the disk, about two- thirds of the way out from the center of the galaxy to the edge of the disk. There are dark patches in the band of light, due to dark clouds of interstellar matter. Radio telescopes can see through these clouds of dust and have shown that the material in our Galaxy is distributed in a disk with spiral arms of material trailing through. Our Galaxy has a bulge of stars at the center, wherein there may lie a giant black hole at the center. The galactic center lies in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius."While I still think it might be a bit too bright in the demo, I have also seen it looking absolutely magnificant as it stretches across the sky.http://epod.usra.edu/archive/images/voil111.jpg is a great fisheye view example of it going from horizon to horizon across the sky. http://www.nightsky.at/Photo/StarF/Cygnus_24mm.html has a great photograph of a portion of the sky near Cygnus which, from the Mid-Atlantic, is in the southern Summer sky. Looking at that photo, maybe it isn't too bright after all.

>I don't know what you are referring to but it's not the Milky>Way but possibly the Andromeda Galaxy. I am definitely not referring to some other galaxy which as you said to a naked eye would be almost a point-like object. I am referring to this huge purple gas-like thing stretching over a significant portion of the sky in this FSX demo. It can only be the Milky way (yes, it is our galaxy) which does occupy a stretch of our sky. But you would never see it from a flying aircraft with its instruments back-lit for night flying, such cockpit light is thousands of times stronger than any light from the Milky way rendering it invisible to a human eye. I even have doubts so many stars would be visible from a typical night cockpit (last time I piloted an aircraft at night I had hard time recognizing enough stars to make out any constellation). Here in this demo the night sky is very strong and the Milky way 'jumps' at you as if you were travelling in some Star Trek spaceship through the cosmos.Michael J.

There are options available for toning the FSX Milky Way down or removing it altogether. It's also in the wrong location in reference to the constellations. Both are in this post: http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...id=16741&page=1

Great post Ed (your name is Ed, isn't it?). Thanks.Michael J.

>I don't know what you are referring to but it's not the Milky>Way but possibly the Andromeda Galaxy. We live in the Milky>Way, it's our galaxy. The Andromeda is one of the nearest>galaxies to our Milky way and appears similar to a star with>the naked eye. As you said it or any of the galaxies near us>shouldn't look like a nebulae only like a star if visible at>all.>>Regards, CarlosWe lie about 26,000 LYs from the center and can certainly "see" the Milky Way even though we happen to be a part of the Milky Way. It's true that we cannot "see" the inner region of our Galaxy simply because of all the dust and gas blocking our particular line of sight. In other wave formats this is not an issue for telescopes. The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.2 million LYs distant and is visible with the naked eye as a very faint blob even in Virginia ;-) and is no larger than a full moon whereas the Milky Way covers a much larger section of the sky from our vantage point. ...............Randy J. Smith................CAUTION! My views represent no one but my own. While I do help companies test products - this in no way means I represent them in ANY fashion.[h4]Evolution is a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations[/h4]

Yup, it's Ed. Thanks

Wow, I didn't know you could see this without telescopes. I guess I got to get out of the city to a country area. So is it like a denser region with more stars?Regards, Carlos

The fun thing is, when i first saw it i thought it was that one stratus cloud from FS9 that had survived into the demo, now visible at night also :) Did you happen to have that too, in FS9 a stratus cloud standing upright popping up once in a while?Regards, Gerrit

I think the Milky Way in the demo looks beautiful. It certainly isn't purple on my system - in fact the colour is pretty well spot-on. Of course it is only visible like this when your eyes are adapted to the darkness. There are already add-ons to tone it down if you wish, so I hope Microsoft doesn't change it. The stars in FSX look far better than in FS2004, due to the greater dynamic range and realistic colour. I hope to add to this when I release AutoStarX in the (hopefully!) near future. For example, Mars will appear in the correct place according to the date and it will have a reddish colour. Best regards, Chris

I agree it seems fairly bright, but I believe the Caribbean doesn't have much light pollution so the Milky Way would be a very prominent feature in the night sky and even create it's own light depending on it's light pollution number via the Bortle scale. A Bortle level of 1 has some areas of the milky way capable of creating enough light to cast faint shadows on the ground.Bortle Scale:http://www.novac.com/lp/def.php Not sure in a cockpit though. I have flown across the Atlantic during the night but never in a window seat.I wonder if flying around cities or heavy light polluted areas in FSX displays this type of night sky or does the sim adjust and lessen the number of stars and celestial objects depending on location? It would be strange if taking off from JFK one could see the Milky Way as seen in the demo.Ian.

> Of course it is only visible like this when your eyes are>adapted to the darkness.Chris, you could never see it from a cockpit of a flying aircraft - cockpit light would kill any Milky Way. I even doubt you would see it from the tarmac of Princess Juliana airport - too much stray light around. Sure it is "beautiful" but it is totally unrealistic to be included in the flight simulator. I will be happy with the option to remove it.Michael J.http://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/for...argo_hauler.gifhttp://sales.hifisim.com/pub-download/asv6-banner-beta.jpg