Star Bright 1.01 1.01

Star Bright 1.01

     I have always thought that the x-plane stars in night sky were a little too bright and I doubt that you would see so many if you were looking out from inside the cockpit.

     So I present here some replacement star 'dat' files.
     You can have stars from 100 times fainter than normal, up to 10,000 times brighter, although I think that the sky would only look like this if we lived inside a globular star cluster.
     I am grateful to X-Plane.org members SeaRider and miketmd for their discussion of the problem on the forum.

Installation:

     1.   Works with X-Plane 10. I cannot test other versions.
     2.  THESE FILES ARE FOR WINDOWS ONLY. (see http://data.x-plane.com/file_specs/Astro740.htmwhich details a simple method to convert them for Mac use.

           I have not done this because I cannot test the result.)
     3.  Replace the 'earth_astro.dat' file located in '.../X-Plane 10/Resources/default data' with the file of your choice.

     4.  PLEASE REMEMBER TO BACK-UP THE ORIGINAL FILE.

Technical:
     X-Plane uses a star index containing 28,000 stars which includes the star's position and brightness.
     The very brightest star (Sirius) has a magnitude of -1.43 and the faintest is 9.99.
     Each magnitude is 10 times fainter, so for example 5.56 is ten times fainter that 4.56.
     A person with good eyesight would not normally be able to see a star fainter than about mag 6.5 which means about 3- 4000 visible stars in the sky.
     I have cut the index down to 15,000 stars up to mag 7.0 (no point in X-Plane doing the calculations if you can't see them)
     The differing 'dat' files were created by cut and paste within a spreadsheet and using the program to add or subtract numbers from the magnitude column (very fiddly and time consuming)

Caveats and disclaimer:
     Any future update of X-plane will try to overwrite this 'dat' file unless you tell it not to.
     I bear no responsibility if this breaks your copy of X-Plane. Nor am I responsible for any other anomaly from the very tiny up to the destruction of the very fabric of existence.

Have Fun!