Well, I tried to make a bit more variable picture, having differently coloured stars, but it just doesn't feel as good as the blue pic I posted earlier. Mostly that is because there's too little actual black sky in this pic, but... oh well, just make your own mind about it. Here goes:
Click to enlarge.
Anyway, the trouble is the same that every space-related game meets: in reality, space is mostly empty. The glorious nebulae visible in sci-fi movies and computer games are highly unprobable. But if one makes the graphics look like real space, it's very dull in most cases.
And regarding the picture posted by Kazan in the starting message of this thread... you all do realize, of course, that the optical phenomena visible in that pic (the four spikes from the bright stars, the bright circles around stars, and light arcs) are caused by optical device(s) that took that picture? Also bear in mind that it's not really blue when seen by naked eye. The gas reflecting the blue light of nearby stars is actually quite gray... with binoculars, you can just see the bunch of blue stars.
And should the mission be located near a similar open cluster, the gas itself would still be just a great diffuse blob of dim grey light, with no great detail on it. Should you get inside the cluster, the only way to notice the gas would be the fact that the background sky would be a bit lighter - which you could tell by the fact that background stars would look dimmer. There would just be a lot of bright stars in the sky. Much brighter than Sirius, I dare say. Evan brighter than the brightest planets in Sol system seem to be (Jupiter/Venus)... but that's about it.
Orbital missions would be much more suitable for creating *realistic* and *cool* backgrounds. Deep space backgrounds can, in most cases, only be either *cool* or *realistic*.
Of course, I tend to think that realistic is cool in it's own way, but I know that that coolness does not reek of graphical goodyness the way, say, DaBrain's nebulae do.
