dim galaxies?

[xafwodahs]

Hi, I just tried version 1.4.1 on both my work computer and home computer. Both machines run WindowsXP. I didn't get my work computer video card info, but my home machine is:

Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer: GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP8X/AGP/SSE/3DNOW!
Version: 1.5.4
Max simultaneous textures: 4
Max texture size: 4096
Point size range: 1.000000 - 63.375000

On both machines, when I ran the demo, the part about "looking at the milky way" showed nothing - or apparently nothing.

When I navigate to the milky way and turn off the lights, I can *barely* make out what looks like a barred spiral galaxy. (more barred than the illustrations I've seen of the Milky Way, but I'm not an astronomer...)

Anyway, any ideas why it would render so dark?

[Malenfant]

Might be your monitor - check the brightness and contrast there. If it's up to full and you still can't see much then your monitor is probably getting a bit old.

[xafwodahs]

Well, my monitor is a LCD. A Samsumg 193P - fairly new. I don't have problems with anything else being too dark, including the stars, moons, etc.

[selden]

Have you tried turning up the "gain" in Celestia?

Type a ) to increase galaxy brightness (shift 0)
Type a ( to turn it down (shift 9)