Celestia Forums

I was browsing the solar system, and from near the Sun, with Earth and Moon at a distance of 1.2 AU, in Celestia the Moon looks a lot brighter than the Earth.

It's almost a bright white dot with a darker blue dot orbiting it.
I always thought that the moon is quite hard to see from a great distance.

Is this intentionally?

It happens here too when starstyle is set to fuzzy or scaled disc rendering.
It does not happen if starstyle is set to point - which is my favorite setting as I find the stars are way too intrusive and not realistic at all with the two other settings.
It looks like Chris is currently working out a better rendering for stars.

EDIT
I had a quick peek at the source code.
It is seemingly a built-in feature.
Here is a comment taken from render.ccp that you can find at line 3982:

// If the an object occupies a pixel or less of screen space, we don't
// render its mesh at all and just display a starlike point instead.
// Switching between the particle and mesh renderings of an object is
// jarring, however . . . so we'll blend in the particle view of the
// object to smooth things out, making it dimmer as the disc size exceeds the
// max disc size.

The code that follows the above comment is well documented. Have a look at it.