NIGHT TIME!!

[Myranda]

you guys might be right, maybe the tress are in the way, or maybe its just that particular region. I'm satisfied with what I'm seeing, but I really hope we can get a night sky like this.

I already complained a little so I didnt want to provoke the knights.. But now that you brought it up - Gridania's sky looks like it has /a little/ light pollution. I see more in the city then they are seeing there lol.

I think they design a 'slightly' light polluted night because they think their players have never seen the real night sky :P

Just to give FFXIV a fair shake:

Actually, I'd give the points to the non-doctored FFXIV screencap for highest accuracy.

The real life photo has way more stars than you'd ever see in RL, even from a dark location. More technically, even if you could see that many, the difference in brightness would be drastically different since the eye responds to light more logarithmically than most cameras (and to me it doesn't look like they've applied a logarithmic stretch to the image data to mimic that), and thus individual constellations should still noticeably pop out from the rest of the starfield. I can barely discern constellations in this photo, and that's just because I know where to look (the teapot of Sagittarius, for example just to the left of the largest part of the dark dusty lanes low to the horizon. It's way more conspicuous to the naked eye). For the record, on Earth there is about 3,000 5,000 stars brighter than the limit of the human eye's capability, so that's the most one should expect to be able to count across the entire sky, and only half that at a given point in time since the other half is below the horizon.

The FFXIV screencap also has a crescent moon in it... even from a dark location, the moon being in the sky has a dramatic effect on what you're able to see. During full moon, you can't really count on seeing much of anything besides the brightest constellations and planets. If anything, there should be fewer stars visible even in this one, especially in the vicinity of the moon. Astronomers call the time around full moon "bright time" because the glare is so bad it even prevents certain types of full-on research observing.

Now, pixellation, yeah that's something that could be smoothed up for the game's stars, but overall I'm satisfied with their general brightness and visibility from 1.0.

Source: 4-years spent in observational astrophysics grad school with many weeks spent on remote mountain top telescopes...