I'm just curious, having turned off nebula in my game for my day-to-day travels in the Bubble, what would a nebula look like up close or inside? ED exaggerates the luminosity and saturation of nebula, just like long exposure photography "exaggerates" the night sky compared to what we see with the naked eye. If I look really hard, I can see a faint "blur" where the Pleiades nebula is in the night sky, along with a similar "blur" in the constellation of Orion. If we were to travel to one of these nebula IRL, would the sky be lit like an aurora (like we see in ED), or would it just be a faint, mostly colorless blur?
What do nebula really look like?
Well, the first question would be: through what would you be looking at it? Cameras aboard a spaceship? With your eye, through a window, in a lit room? Floating in space, through a visor on your spacesuit? Down from a planet's surface, with all the atmosphere between you and the nebula? And so on. All these would influence things in various ways.
With a camera, you could enhance even a live feed to have the nebula appear better.
As far as I know, the cockpit glass and/or the helmets of our characters do change things anyway, so Elite could explain the visibility of nebula that way. After all, when you jump quite close to a star, you don't go blind.
With a camera, you could enhance even a live feed to have the nebula appear better.
As far as I know, the cockpit glass and/or the helmets of our characters do change things anyway, so Elite could explain the visibility of nebula that way. After all, when you jump quite close to a star, you don't go blind.
It depends on out of wich elements the nebula is formed. The most pictures (e.g. from Hubble) uses different wavelenghts that were all put together to awesomeness. But nevertheless it should still look great "irl" like flying through clouds in a plane.
An Example:
You couldn't see the nebula at all with naked eye when inside the nebula.
Most of them are too dim to see with the naked eye (at least from Earth). However the "color" becomes a complicated question in itself. Several factors here-- Many of the photographs we see either have enhanced color saturation, or are false-color photos taken in various wavelengths. Some of them are true-color, but the colors are more vibrant due to the long exposure photography used. Our eyes have very weak receptors for color, relative to the brightness receptors. When light is dim, we lose color differentiation the most. So even the things we can see with the naked eye can look more bland, or grey in color, just due to our eye's insensitivity to color with dim objects.
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To the naked eye, most nebulae up close would look fuzzy-grey, or even (dare I say it) beige, assuming we could see them at all. As Orvidius and others have stated, they're not bright enough for our eyes to clearly make out the colour differences.
A fresh supernova remnant, or a reflection nebula created by a super-bright star like Eta Carinae, might be bright enough to be visible in colour, if there was any colour visible to see.
A fresh supernova remnant, or a reflection nebula created by a super-bright star like Eta Carinae, might be bright enough to be visible in colour, if there was any colour visible to see.
One of the things that's just mind-boggling, is that the nebulae are "thick" enough to experience fluid dynamics, but inside them they are still a more perfect vacuum than we can create here on Earth. Over large enough scales, gases can still behave with typical fluid dynamics despite how few actual atoms/molecules exist in any given volume of space. (Interstellar space is often just one (or a few) molecules per cubic meter, and the most dense nebulae may have areas of up to 10,000 (10^4), compared to about 10^25 for sea level air pressure here).
Fun little Astronomy 101 factoid: surface brightness, or intensity per unit of solid angle, is constant over distance.
To unpack that statement a bit, consider that the angular resolution of your retina is around one arcminute, or 1/60 of a degree (the full moon is about 30 arcminutes across). So one "pixel" on your retina (ignoring for now the biology behind that) covers about (one arcminute)2 of solid angle when looking at the scene in front of you. Similarly if you point a digital camera at a scene, the focal length of the camera and the size of the detector would let you calculate the corresponding solid angle for one pixel of the CCD sensor. If you set the focal length such that one pixel spans one arcminute, similar to your eye, the full moon would be about 30 pixels across in the resulting image.
When pointing this camera at a scene, the sensor is going to return a signal reporting how much light hit each pixel while the shutter was open. If you save your photos as RAW you will get these readouts as-is, otherwise they are lost to the image processing. The detectors used by professional astronomers can be precise enough to record the actual number of photons that hit the sensor, in fact! The surface brightness of a scene is the light flux per unit time per unit solid angle, or in terms of our camera, the number of photons (or amount of radiant energy) per second that hits one pixel.
So the fact up top means that if you take a photo of a uniform-brightness object (say a piece of paper under constant lighting), and move the camera closer or farther away, the light hitting each pixel will not change. In astronomical terms, imagine looking at two identical galaxies through a telescope, one twice as far away as the other. The farther one will be smaller, and thus will yield less total light, but each pixel of the first galaxy will be the same brightness as the corresponding pixel of the second galaxy. If you think in terms of the 1/R2 law, in the picture of the farther galaxy each star (while too faint to resolve individually) is 1/4 as bright, but each pixel of the farther galaxy contains 4 times as many stars, so the two factors cancel out.
So, to apply this to @Old Duck 's original question - go somewhere with very dark skies, and look up at the Pleiades, or the Orion Nebula. If the Earth was right up next to them, they would be exactly that brightness, but that brightness would cover a much larger portion of the sky. In the case of the Pleiades, it would probably be about as bright as the Milky Way is. Orion would be somewhat brighter, but still too faint to make out the vivid colors you see in photographs. But something like Barnard's Loop or the Witch Head Nebula would be mostly too faint to see at all with the naked eye.
And a final point to consider: dusty nebulae -- which are most star forming regions like Orion, the Coalsack, etc -- are also fairly opaque. So they would be also be highlighted by the fact that you'd see a few bright foreground stars in front of them, but no stars behind them.
To unpack that statement a bit, consider that the angular resolution of your retina is around one arcminute, or 1/60 of a degree (the full moon is about 30 arcminutes across). So one "pixel" on your retina (ignoring for now the biology behind that) covers about (one arcminute)2 of solid angle when looking at the scene in front of you. Similarly if you point a digital camera at a scene, the focal length of the camera and the size of the detector would let you calculate the corresponding solid angle for one pixel of the CCD sensor. If you set the focal length such that one pixel spans one arcminute, similar to your eye, the full moon would be about 30 pixels across in the resulting image.
When pointing this camera at a scene, the sensor is going to return a signal reporting how much light hit each pixel while the shutter was open. If you save your photos as RAW you will get these readouts as-is, otherwise they are lost to the image processing. The detectors used by professional astronomers can be precise enough to record the actual number of photons that hit the sensor, in fact! The surface brightness of a scene is the light flux per unit time per unit solid angle, or in terms of our camera, the number of photons (or amount of radiant energy) per second that hits one pixel.
So the fact up top means that if you take a photo of a uniform-brightness object (say a piece of paper under constant lighting), and move the camera closer or farther away, the light hitting each pixel will not change. In astronomical terms, imagine looking at two identical galaxies through a telescope, one twice as far away as the other. The farther one will be smaller, and thus will yield less total light, but each pixel of the first galaxy will be the same brightness as the corresponding pixel of the second galaxy. If you think in terms of the 1/R2 law, in the picture of the farther galaxy each star (while too faint to resolve individually) is 1/4 as bright, but each pixel of the farther galaxy contains 4 times as many stars, so the two factors cancel out.
So, to apply this to @Old Duck 's original question - go somewhere with very dark skies, and look up at the Pleiades, or the Orion Nebula. If the Earth was right up next to them, they would be exactly that brightness, but that brightness would cover a much larger portion of the sky. In the case of the Pleiades, it would probably be about as bright as the Milky Way is. Orion would be somewhat brighter, but still too faint to make out the vivid colors you see in photographs. But something like Barnard's Loop or the Witch Head Nebula would be mostly too faint to see at all with the naked eye.
And a final point to consider: dusty nebulae -- which are most star forming regions like Orion, the Coalsack, etc -- are also fairly opaque. So they would be also be highlighted by the fact that you'd see a few bright foreground stars in front of them, but no stars behind them.
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I also never heard someone saying: "Did you see all those red dwarfs last night? It was marvelous." But they exist and they are VERY bright if you could fly to one of them. In fact Red Dwarfs are one of the most common stars in the galaxy if not the entire universe.
So, point is. You cannot see Barnard's Loop for various reason:
1. Resolution of your eyesight
2. Earth's albedo
3. atmospheric diffusion
4. distance
...
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Only thing I know they wouldn't look all the same like in the game 
Barnard's Loop is invisible in real life simply because it's far too dim. Neither the ancient Greeks, Persians, Indians, Chinese nor Arabs ever spotted it. The "Barnard" in the name is the same "Barnard" in Barnard's Star: E.E. Barnard, pioneering astrophotographer. Only with photography can you collect enough light from Barnard's Loop to observe the nebulosity.
E.E. Barnard must have paid a rather high Kickstarter amount when the galaxy was made. Not only does he have a star and a nebula named after him, he's also got a mountain in California, a crater on the Moon, a crater on Mars, a Region on Ganymede, and an asteroid.
E.E. Barnard must have paid a rather high Kickstarter amount when the galaxy was made. Not only does he have a star and a nebula named after him, he's also got a mountain in California, a crater on the Moon, a crater on Mars, a Region on Ganymede, and an asteroid.
It's probably obvious to most, but the reason I posed this question is that the mod I'm using to turn space black also removes all the nebula. Seeing that I'm going for realism over art, and that I mostly explorer the "shores" of the Bubble, I'm totally happy with this. Your answers to my question just confirms that this mod is "amazingly realistic". Thank you!
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Amazingly Realistic Immersion Mod
UPDATE - The latest version of this mod is available in this post from this very long thread. This is the last update I'll be making before Odyssey releases. For those who want more customizations and fine-tuning of their HUD, I recommend checking out EDHM, which is more user friendly than mine...
It's probably obvious to most, but the reason I posed this question is that the mod I'm using to turn space black also removes all the nebula. Seeing that I'm going for realism over art, and that I mostly explorer the "shores" of the Bubble, I'm totally happy with this. Your answers to my question just confirms that this mod is "amazingly realistic". Thank you!
Amazingly Realistic Immersion Mod
UPDATE - The latest version of this mod is available in this post from this very long thread. This is the last update I'll be making before Odyssey releases. For those who want more customizations and fine-tuning of their HUD, I recommend checking out EDHM, which is more user friendly than mine...
Why is this realistic? Nebulas can also be seen in visible light. It's more unrealistic you remove all nebulas.
Did you ignore this entire thread? Anyway, if you want bright glowing unrealistic nebula, don't use the mod
Did you ignore this entire thread? Anyway, if you want bright glowing unrealistic nebula, don't use the mod
And because they are faint you remove them at all and call it realistic? Mkay.
Would understand it if you use a mod to dim the colors or saturation but removing them completely, nope.
If you read my OP on the mod, you'll see that I'm mostly operating in and around the Bubble, where a black sky with no visible nebula IS realistic (unless you claim to be able to see all these nebula IRL when you look at the stars at night). I'm very clear that explorers who operate closer to the core should probably avoid the mod. So I'm not sure why you've come into this thread trying to pick a fight. It's not like I'm demanding that Frontier change the game itself. If you don't like it, move on.
Well, that we can't see them IRL from Earth is logical. It's also logical we wouldn't see it as an astronaut cause the sun is too bright. How it would be if we were far enough from any light source we only can guess.
Yeah, I got that. I might even try your mod, but probably wouldn't use it full time. It's a real pity that it's not possible to be more selective about what it turns off - losing the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds entirely is just a step too far for my tastes. I use those for navigation!It's probably obvious to most, but the reason I posed this question is that the mod I'm using to turn space black also removes all the nebula. Seeing that I'm going for realism over art, and that I mostly explorer the "shores" of the Bubble, I'm totally happy with this. Your answers to my question just confirms that this mod is "amazingly realistic". Thank you!
Amazingly Realistic Immersion Mod
UPDATE - The latest version of this mod is available in this post from this very long thread. This is the last update I'll be making before Odyssey releases. For those who want more customizations and fine-tuning of their HUD, I recommend checking out EDHM, which is more user friendly than mine...