In my pre­vi­ous rant about dynam­ic expo­sure in Elite Dan­ger­ous (which hon­est­ly applies to any oth­er space game made to date), I made a rough cal­cu­la­tion to pre­dict the bright­ness of stars as they should real­is­ti­cal­ly appear in pho­tos tak­en in out­er space. My pre­dic­tion was, that,

• for an illu­mi­na­tion of sim­i­lar strength to that on earth,
• if the sun­lit parts are prop­er­ly exposed,
• and with an angu­lar res­o­lu­tion of about 2 arc min­utes per pixel,

then the pix­el-val­ue of a promi­nent star should be in the order of 1 to 3 (out of 255, in 8‑bit sRGB encod­ing). Since then I was curi­ous to find some real world val­i­da­tion for that fact, and it seems I have now found it.

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