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Hi Fred and Mike
Stellarium is capable of very good representations of all the sky phenomena but it does need to be set up carefully to suit your system and the complex opengl display does not work universally on all video systems.
The different types of monitors generally have differences in the gamma which makes it very hard to get a "fits all" display and everyone seems to like to set the brightness and contrast to suit their own taste.
To get a good display you first need to set the brightness, contrast and gamma using an accurate grey scale stair step program. This done you can play with the bortal scale adjustments to simulate you own locality. You can then adjust the absolute and relative scales for the stars to make them more realistic.
Eclipses of the moon are difficult to display. The shadow of the penumbra will be almost non existant if the brightness and contrast are incorrectly set but can be very realistic if set correctly.
In reference to the library of galaxies and nebulae. The textures that are provided are generally quite primative and everyone has a different idea of intensity, colour balance and saturation for enhancement in how they like to see them. In general the absolute brightness bears little relation to the real levels. If it was you would not see much.
I have a library of extra textures kindly provided by many members of this forum. These I have adjusted the levels as much as possible and integrated into stellarium. Making a library of textures is a very tedious job but the results are usually worthwhile. one texture can take many hours to get it oriented correctly so that it overlays the catalogue of stars. I have three nice mosaics of the LMC, Eta Carinae and the Antares/Rho Ophiuchus area that fit very nicely
In the future photos from the DSS will be downloaded as required to fill in the background of the whole sky. In fact the necessary code is already present but not activated, mainly due to some confusion over permissions at the moment. To see what it is like you can Google Virgo and locate the Virgo variation of Stellarium that has the DSS activated.
I regularly have later versions of Stellarium which I compile regularly but it is difficult to pass them on to people other than personally because of their size. ( I am the Tester according to the Stellarium.org home page).
If you have any specific queries please ask and I will try to find out the answers.
Barry
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