The galaxy is too red

[Saool]

We heard a lot about planets become beige, but there is another colour issue that nags me every time I undock: the milky way is not very milky at all. To my mind it is far too brown, orange and red. Most true colour photographs show it to be far more white and blue, and indeed most start look much more white to the eye.

Thoughts?

 

[thundernuns]

It looks like a mostly cream with some orange parts to me, I don't know about red. Are you using a graphics pack?

 

[Saool]

It looks like a mostly cream with some orange parts to me, I don't know about red. Are you using a graphics pack?

No that sounds about right. I'm using red as a generalisation.

 

[thundernuns]

You are right, it looks a bit too orangey. It does get whiter the further away you are from it though. So many variables [blah]

 

[CMDR Murf]

It also looks way too bright in my opinion

 

[duckofdeath]

No that sounds about right. I'm using red as a generalisation.


http://i.imgur.com/A8WWpLJ.png

That image comparison is a bit unfair. The in-game screeenie you have looks like it's from around 15,000 LY's from the core while the photo reference is a post processed shot taken from earth, through the atmosphere and all that.
The colours are boosted in game, I agree. But, it's not extreme. This is a photo taken from space. The vast amounts of dust (and probably the high rate of small redish stars) does make it quite red. Also, remember our super advanced filtering glass on our ships has an automated brightness, adapting to the relative shininess of everything near you.

Spoiler

 

[Heavy Johnson]

Also, our real-life view of the Milky Way is through atmosphere; unless that picture was from a space station.

 

[FluffyBob]

I have heard this atmosphere thing before and it is just not correct. If anything due to scattering of blue light viewing the galaxy through earth's atmosphere is going to make it look more, not less red. To the naked eye (even in space) the milky way is too dim to show much if any colour. Colour is really only apparent in time exposures, and in those it really does look mostly bluish white with small red areas due to nebulae. If we could see the galactic core from earth it would have a yellowish hue due to the majority of the stars being old. The galactic arms have a lot of young blue stars which skews the milky way as viewed from earth location to the blue side of white.

Elite dangerous has a definite style palette that is very much into warm colours. The orange hud, the biege/pumpkin coloured planets, and a brown galaxy. Even the lighting in a lot of space stations seem to be orange. Ship canopies have some kind of magical light enhancement feature that allows us to see pitch black shadows as if in daylight and a the galaxy as a brightly glowing feature. I suppose it skews things to the red. I suspect that actual reason is that the visual design lead at Frontier either really likes the palette that way or is red-green colour blind.

I would really really love to see a more true colour (i.e. mostly white) milkyway. It also would be nice to land on a plain old grey planet sometime - you know - the colour that the vast majority of bodies in our solar system exhibit.

Frontier made a choice about colour and sorry folks whatever the reason it was not for accuracy.

 

[Heavy Johnson]

It also would be nice to land on a plain old grey planet sometime - you know - the colour that the vast majority of bodies in our solar system exhibit.

You haven't landed on a generic rocky body any time recently have you. Almost all the rocky bodies I find out there /are/ generic grey...

 

[Jackie Silver]

We're seeing a processed view of some sort otherwise there's a lot of places that would be too uncomfortable to survive.

It would be nice if the view through broken cockpit glass was more extreme sometimes.

 

[Qohen Leth]

Would be nice too if ambiant light was less warm than it is.

 

[CMDR MERANGO]

Was at one yesterday that was pink, yellow and blue.

CMIV

 

[Sterlino]

i'm up for ''customize your galaxy colors'' in the store... SOON !!

 

[Lightspeed]

I have heard this atmosphere thing before and it is just not correct. If anything due to scattering of blue light viewing the galaxy through earth's atmosphere is going to make it look more, not less red. To the naked eye (even in space) the milky way is too dim to show much if any colour. Colour is really only apparent in time exposures, and in those it really does look mostly bluish white with small red areas due to nebulae. If we could see the galactic core from earth it would have a yellowish hue due to the majority of the stars being old. The galactic arms have a lot of young blue stars which skews the milky way as viewed from earth location to the blue side of white.

I suspect that actual reason is that the visual design lead at Frontier either really likes the palette that way or is red-green colour blind.

I came to the same conclusion after the Dolphin was released ...... yet another ship with orange along the sides [weird]

 

[Sapyx]

The galactic glow is supposed to be a composite of all the stars that comprise it. So I would assume the "redness" of the galaxy is a by-product of the over-redness of stars in the game. M, K, G and F class stars are all "too red/yellow" compared to how they would look up close to human eyes.

 

[Orvidius]

The galactic glow is supposed to be a composite of all the stars that comprise it. So I would assume the "redness" of the galaxy is a by-product of the over-redness of stars in the game. M, K, G and F class stars are all "too red/yellow" compared to how they would look up close to human eyes.

This is true. Many of the colors for stars are really a result of black body radiation curves, where the peak of the curve is outside of our visual range, but resulting in a sloped frequency distribution within our visible range. This means they can be strongly biased toward red or blue, but they still have strong output across our visible spectrum.

What I also find amusing is when G-class stars are described as yellow (our sun is a G2V). That's not really accurate, though to be fair, it's often referred to as a yellow dwarf. To our eyes, our sun is about as white as they can get, since our visible range is fairly close to being centered on our Sun's peak frequency output. This is no coincidence. That's the range that our sun is brightest, and also a range of frequencies that both our atmosphere, and water are transparent to. The fact that our sun looks yellowish to us is entirely a byproduct of the atmosphere scattering more blue than other colors. From space, the sun looks quite white. And if you want to get even more technical, our sun's peak output is in the cyan-greenish part of the spectrum, so technically it's about as close as you can get to having a green star.

 

[bighank]

Problem is...we're all trained to think that space 'looks' the way that say, a Hubble image looks...or a composite of any of the great orbital and land observatories we have. This really isn't the case. Anyone who's done any amateur astronomy can tell you that even with a good, dark, away from civilization sky even the band of the milky way looks like just that...a hazy band. You won't see all the fine detail and color fill-in unless you set up a tracking rig and use composited long exposures. Things like nebulae in a typical sub $1000 telescope setup look like hazy washed out blobs. Same thing with Andromeda. It comes down to the difference between how our eyes work and how a typical CCD or CMOS sensor works. Digital cameras can sit there for hours with specific filters waiting for the trickle of photons that have the value that matches to come in from the object being observed. Each photon that does hit the sensor is recorded precisely. All of that is then composited into the final image. Your eyes just don't work like that.

To put it in perspective: The Hubble Deep field was a composite of Hubble staring at the same patch of sky for ten days. That's 347 separate exposures for a total of 47 hours or so of observation time just to get that image....and that's from a telescope that is the size of a typical school bus and is in orbit around the Earth. Any amateur astronomy photographer will tell you that to get a great picture you have to ascertain what wavelengths you want to catch and then set up multiple exposure runs, most of which will last at least 10 minutes..and many times composite up to several hours...just to get one image.

If the game were to be truly accurate the milky way would be a much more dim, hazy off-white streak in the background that would be easily drowned out by any nearby stars...and you'd only get that hazy off-white streak when you were in the shadow of a planet with no other planets nearby (the luminosity difference of say a moon being shined on by a star would be enough to severely curtail your ability to see it).

Bummer. I have to say though, they did get the hazy, almost non-descript nature of it kinda right when you're out exploring.

 

[Saool]

Some good thoughts, thank you for offering them. When I did do the search for the Milky-way image I used, I did try to find an image taken from space. But I have no way of knowing if it was. I suspect not, as I imagine it is pretty hard to see anything other than the Sun, Earth and Moon, from orbit, unless you are called Hubble.

I'm also aware than most space photography is done over long times frames and you will never see anything like the photographs we typically see of Nebula, with the naked eye, they are all far too dim (Case it point: when was the last time you stepped out side at night, looked up in the sky (in the Northern hemisphere), and said 'oh look, Barnard's loop').

But I would sooner see things a bit more life like, so less red and most start looking white, and the milky way being... milky.

 

[Orvidius]

Something else to consider is that spiral galaxies tend to have a lot more blue in general (for instance compared to elliptical galaxies), because they have a lot of star formation regions within the spiral arms. Large blue stars are bright, but very short lived. Smaller red stars are very long lived. And this discrepancy is huge. Blue stars tend to live for less than a billion years, often significantly less, measured in only millions of years. However red dwarfs may in some cases live for hundreds of billions of years into the future. The presence of blue stars therefore indicates areas of active star formation, and a lack of blue stars indicates an older area without active star formation.

It's possible that some of the lack of blue in the game comes from not fully modeling the relative luminosity of the stars. While blue stars are less numerous due to their short lifespans, they also can be very bright and therefore visible from very far away.

 

[Saool]

As per the image I currently use as a wallpaper across all my devices... the Pinwheel Galaxy.