Stars in FSX

[andante]

I find the stars in FSX to be quite poor and wondered if there are any star additions other than Autostar or the star.dat from fsim.net.
Any ideas?

I am running Windows 7 64bit.

Hopefully, andante

[daspinall]

I saw Bruce Willis at LAX once only start i ever saw in FSX... star.dat is the one i use in fs9 I'm not aware of any other than the above mentioned..


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[JSkorna]

Hi,

The same person that designed AutoStar updated his program for FSX and is called AutoStarX.

[opaplano]

Here it is -

Name: autostrx.zip (http://www.flightsim.com/kdl.php?fid=107559) Size: 731,255 Date: 12-27-2006 Downloads: 4,140
http://www.flightsim.com/images/fscfiles/l/autostrx.gif FSX AutoStar X, v1.01, a utility that adds new features to the night sky such as brighter planets in the correct position for any date, comets and even user objects such as an eclipse or Messier object. The SAO star catalog can be imported to greatly increase the number of background stars. By Chris Wright.

[freddy]

The star field in default FSX is, apparently, accurate. You should be able to pick out the constellations and, so I am told, even navigate by them. However, I personally find there are just far too many stars (pixels) in the skies and it's just impossible to pick out ANY of the constellations. And that is despite doing my fair share of amateur astronomy and knowing the Southern Hemisphere's night skies reasonably well. For example, I can't even find the Southern Cross constellation, nor Orion. Both of which are very prominent in the Southern Hemisphere night sky. I don't know whether this has something to do with my video settings or what ... but I am very happy with the way my monitor is set up and the aircraft panels, the ground, the airports, and all other night flying effects are just fine as they are without seemingly requiring any adjustments to brightness, contrast and/or other settings. Not being able to find/see the constellations doesn't really bother me ... but, that said, if one is supposed to be able to see them and even navigate by them, then it is slightly disappointing that one personally cannot.

I did not know about this AutoStarX program. Hmmm. It could be worth trying.

[llivaudais]

I used AutoStarX briefly but didn't care for the 'additions' to the sky so I tried to "CUT BACK" the number of displayed stars that are used in the .dat file

; number of stars in [Star Locations] table
;NumStars=9096
NumStars=4548

Unfortunately, the default ORDER of stars is by POSITION so that only blanked out half the sky and left the remaining portion as dense as it initially was.
The solution was to REORDER the data section by Magnitude so that only the brighter half remained visible when reducing the number.

I just imported the data section as .csv into Excel, sorted rows by magnitude, then the leftmost (Star.1234) column back into ascending order; pasted the original heading section onto the reordered list and only see the brightest 50% across the whole sky.

A couple of years ago, I got tired of seeing stars before the sun went down and just turned them off. I've been watching the sky for over 50 years but I fly so rarely at night that I don't even miss them. I DO enjoy seeing a full 'high Res' moon come up at sunset though....

Loyd

[andante]

Sorry to be late in replying to your post "OPA" I have been side tracked by some health probs.
I have downloaded AutostarX and will try it once more. with my original download there was a dll problem I could not get round, possibly because I was trying the original Autostar from years ago.
Thanks for your input.

Cheers, andante

[phil2097]

Help, I don't quite know what I am doing. The readme.txt doesen't really explaine what to do with all the files. So far I have Unziped all the files from AutoStarX.zip into c:\Program Files (x86)

I have renamed the default "stars.dat" in the main Flight Simulator X directory to "FSXdefault.dat"

From now on it is unclear, what do I do with The three sub-directories. bitmaps, star_data and settings.

What is "AutoStarX.exe" for? If I double click it, I get a System Error. "The program can't start because MSVBVM50.DLL is missing from your computer. Try reanstalling the program to fix this problem."

I could do with real simple step by step instructions. Any help would be much appreciated.

Windows 7 64bit.


Here it is -

Name: autostrx.zip (http://www.flightsim.com/kdl.php?fid=107559) Size: 731,255 Date: 12-27-2006 Downloads: 4,140
http://www.flightsim.com/images/fscfiles/l/autostrx.gif FSX AutoStar X, v1.01, a utility that adds new features to the night sky such as brighter planets in the correct position for any date, comets and even user objects such as an eclipse or Messier object. The SAO star catalog can be imported to greatly increase the number of background stars. By Chris Wright.

[fxsttcb]

From "AutoStarX_manual.doc"
"As it is a Visual Basic program it requires the VB runtime module." Meaning MSVBVM50.DLL "Most PC’s probably have this installed, but if not it is available from Microsoft." http://support.microsoft.com/kb/180071 ...Don

[eagleworks4u]

I want to remove the goofy stars such as merry christmas pluto etc.... do I just delete the bmp files before install????:confused:

[fxsttcb]

I'd just rename 'em *.bak instead of *.bmp, just in case...Don

[JSkorna]

I want to remove the goofy stars such as merry christmas pluto etc.... do I just delete the bmp files before install????:confused:

There is a option in the FS Auto Stars interface to stop those from showing.