NightObservatory

Night Observatory
A quiet meadow at night, a single telescope, and a sky where you know no star by name. Identify a star, and a line is drawn from it. The sky reveals only as much as you know.

Highlights

A real sky: 1,667 stars from the HYG astronomical catalog, placed and rotating exactly as at latitude 37.2°N

Identify stars through the telescope to connect constellation lines, one by one — an album of all 88 constellations

All 110 Messier objects — accumulate long exposures to bloom faint smudges into real Hubble/ESO photographs

Star-trail photography: watch trails circle Polaris, up to a full 360°

Command time itself — up to 600× speed and month-skipping to collect every season's sky

A calm, complete experience of one to two hours, tutorial included

 ✦ Notes

- The first launch may take a few minutes to prepare shaders (CPU hitting 100% is normal, only happens once). Graphics quality will also auto-adjust to your PC.

- If you get a "Component is missing" error, run the included `Engine/Extras/Redist/en-us/vc_redist.x64.exe`.

- Requires Windows 10/11 64-bit and a GPU that supports DirectX 12. If any issues occur, please share `%LOCALAPPDATA%/NightObservatory/Saved/Diag.txt` in the comments.

✦ Credits

- Deep-sky photos: NASA/ESA Hubble, ESO, etc. — individually noted in-game (CC BY)

- Milky Way panorama: ESO/S. Brunier (CC BY 4.0)

- Star data: HYG Database · Constellation lines: d3-celestial (BSD-3)

- Made with Unreal Engine 5