do you ever just stop in the middle of a game to look at the night sky??

so I was supposed to be doing a timed escort mission last night and instead I stood on a hill for like ten minutes trying to work out if the devs put real constellations in... I failed the mission obviously!! Totally worth it though

I'm pretty sure I spotted something close to Orion but the belt was crooked... honestly which made me unreasonably upset lol. honestly fun fact, the three belt stars aren't actually close to each other at all They just line up from where we're standing!! Anyway now I'm checking every game's sky, and that's how I ended up with yet another hobby I didn't need

lol the belt's actually a little crooked in real life too, it's never been a perfect line, so you might've just been paying attention for once. i stopped mid-match in rocket league once to look at the skybox and my teammate typed "are you having a stroke" in all chat. nope, just admiring teh clouds that some guy at psyonix probably spent three weeks on somebody should appreciate them

i did it in red dead 2 so many times my horse just wandered off and got killed by a cougar while i was looking at the stars. no regrets, that was a good sky. arthur can walk

also nobody brings up that half the time the in-game night sky is better than the real one now. i live by a gas station with one of those LED canopies so i get maybe four stars and something blinking that might be a plane or a drone or a guy on a roof with a flashlight. been meaning to spraypaint a little constellation on the underside of that canopy just to give us something. tasteful, small, glow in the dark. call it a public service

lol the gas station canopy is a real problem. those LEDs are usually around 4000K+ and blue-heavy light scatters more, so it washes out the sky worse than the old sodium lamps did. https://www.lightpollutionmap.info punch in your address and get sad

and yeah i stop in games all the time. outer wilds mostly. also hit F12 so many times in rdr2 my spacebar started rattling, ended up re-lubing the stabs because of a sunset

lowkey just punched my address into that map and I'm sitting in a bright orange blob... so that explains a lot!! the blue-white LEDs are extra bad bc blue light scatters way more in the atmosphere than the old orange sodium glow did, so the whole sky just gets washed out

re-lubing st

im in an orange blob too the new LED lights over the pickleball courts sure don't help, they're SO bright and someone always leaves them on after their game is over even though there's a sign... anyway I still go out back by the retention pond some nights and you can at least see Jupiter and the bright ones, plus the herons fussing in the dark lol my grandson Tyler has one of those phone apps that tells you what everything is and he thinks it's magic!! Just my two cents!!

herons fussing in the dark is honestly the best part of that post. i had one stare me down by a drainage ditch once at like 11pm and i left i didnt even argue with it

tell tyler the app thing gets less magic when it tells you the cool bright star youve been looking at for twenty minutes is a starlink satellite. happened to me twice this summer and i'm still a little hurt about it

omg did everyone see Pam just call out the light-leaver-onner?? there's a SIGN and they still leave them on!! pam you gotta tell us who it is... also your post cut off at "the bri"... brightest star?? Sirius? i need closure!! (says me, who forgets to close my own browser tabs lol)

lol the gas station canopy is a real problem.

yeah and our city actually has a dark sky ordinance that says full cutoff fixtures and 3000K max on commercial lighting the gas station on 9th went up two years ago with flat lenses that light up half the block and nobody's said a word about it. apparently the rule only gets enforced when someone puts up a slightly too tall fence...

I will admit, just recently in Fortnite I have caught myself stopping and looking at the night sky when it is shown in the game.

I have to admit though, the sky in Fortnite does look really good, and they have so much detail when it comes to the night sky showing.

yeah and our city actually has a dark sky ordinance that says full cutoff fixtures and 3000K max on commercial lighting the gas station on 9th went up two years ago with flat lenses that light up half the block and nobody's said a word about it

ooh nice, a 3000K cap is solid!! tbh even better if they ever push it down to 2700K or lower... Flagstaff was the very first International Dark Sky City back in 2001 and they still use a bunch of amber lighting. lowkey does your ordinance actually cover the gas station canopy though?? i keep reading that canopies get exempted or grandfathered in i'd go look up my own town's rules but i'd probably get distracted halfway through lol

yeah 2700K would be nice but it took our council a year and a half just to land on 3000K, and the whole time somebody kept bringing up "safety" like the 7-Eleven's gonna get robbed in amber light... i'm not holding my breath for another round of that

and to the actual thread question, yes. i stopped mid-round of disc golf last week because Jupiter was just sitting there over the tree line then i three-putted the next hole so it wasn't free...