On 3/24/2011 4:34 AM, gregjohn wrote:
>
> Thanks for the link: inspiring.  Interestingly, these show exactly the problem.
> I have been living in areas of massive light pollution for decades and so I have
> no real idea of what space looks like anymore. We have the Hubble images
> available to us, which provide a "ridiculous" number of stars that you know the
> human eye cannot see.  So that created problems for me in deciding how to do CG
> space scenes: how many stars are actually seen out there?

I occasionally go to areas in the desert where there is *very* little 
light pollution, so I searched for a picture online which conveyed what 
it looks like.  Unfortunately I wasn't able to find anything, and I 
think the reason is because of the high dynamic range of the human eye.

In a real night sky in dry clear air and without light pollution there 
are a *lot* of stars, but most of them are very faint with a gradual 
gradation to a smaller number of significantly brighter stars.  This 
appears to just be really hard to convey with three 8-bit color channels 
or on a standard monitor.

On the bright side, at least you can stop worrying about getting the 
number of stars in a CG image correct and just blame any inaccuracies 
the limitations of images/monitors.!

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