Are there built in limits to size and distance in povray?
There seems to be...
If I Add a zero to the scale and Z position of the spheres in the below
starfield generator, the render speed drops to a dead crawl, and the stars
cease to render...The actual cut off point is something between 500,000 and
600,000 distance...I haven't bothered to find the exact limits, but this is
very annoying limitation because it makes modeling things like solar
systems either impossible or painful (try making earth a size of 1 radius,
and you still run out of room before you hit the outer planets, so earth
needs to be like .0001 or something crazy like that...obviously this makes
smaller obects like the moon or a space station suddenly become
...00000000001...bleh)
Does anyone know the limits?  or is there something fundamentally wrong with
my code (beyond a lack of compact-code, or the fact that the memory overhead
for this is far greater than for a bit map).

#declare xrndstar=seed(54321);
union{
#declare Count = 0;
#while (Count<500)
object{
sphere{<0,0,500000>,720}
rotate< rand(xrndstar)*360, (rand(xrndstar)*360+rand(xrndstar)*360) ,
(rand(xrndstar)*360+rand(xrndstar)*360)>
pigment{rgb< 1+(rand(xrndstar)*2) , 1+(rand(xrndstar)*1.5) ,
1+(rand(xrndstar)*1) >*.75}
finish{ambient 2}
no_shadow}
#declare Count = Count+1;
#end
#declare Count = 0;
#while (Count<750)
object{
sphere{<0,0,500000>,720}
rotate< rand(xrndstar)*360, (rand(xrndstar)*360+rand(xrndstar)*360) ,
(rand(xrndstar)*360+rand(xrndstar)*360)>
pigment{rgb< .5+(rand(xrndstar)*1) , .5+(rand(xrndstar)*.75) ,
...5+(rand(xrndstar)*.5) >*.75}
finish{ambient 1.5}
no_shadow no_reflection}
#declare Count = Count+1;
#end
#declare Count = 0;
#while (Count<1000)
object{
sphere{<0,0,500000>,720}
rotate< rand(xrndstar)*360, (rand(xrndstar)*360+rand(xrndstar)*360) ,
(rand(xrndstar)*360+rand(xrndstar)*360)>
pigment{rgb< .25+(rand(xrndstar)*.5) , .25+(rand(xrndstar)*.375) ,
...25+(rand(xrndstar)*.25) >*.75}
finish{ambient 1}
no_shadow no_reflection}
#declare Count = Count+1;
#end
}

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