Celestia Forums

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?

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.

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.

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)