Why is the dark side of Eeloo so bright?

[Ty Tan Tu]

I finally made it to Eeloo for the first time. Yeah! But I was surprised to find the dark side of Eeloo so bright. It does not have an atmosphere, so I expected it to be black as black can get. But the surface is very visible from orbit. Is there a reason for that? Or is it just sort of a game/video card glitch where the shader doesn't get it dark enough because it is so white to start with, or something?

[RandomUser]

Looks fine to me.  I mean, it has effectively the same brightness as the others, from the looks of things. 

[2204happy]

That is from the ambient light, you can remove it with mods like planetshine.

[NSEP]

Eeloo is made out if ice crystals that scatter light everywhere i geuss.

[MinimalMinmus]

My theory: there is a minimum light amount, and eeloo's high albedo causes it to be bright.

Oooooor...

"You thought Sarnus was installed by OPM, but Sarnus was really here the whole time"

Edited January 23, 2017 by MinimalMinmus

[Foxster]

There is no dark side of Eeloo really. As a matter of fact it's all dark. 

[cantab]

Yeah, the game does ambient light. Justifiable for playability IMHO.

[Archgeek]

15 hours ago, cantab said:

Yeah, the game does ambient light. Justifiable for playability IMHO.

Yup, before that was a thing, and before I'd learned to fly a kerbal on EVA (a trial by fire that really helped with learning docking later) I had an EVA accident wherein I nearly lost my ship in the darkness.  I started putting z100's on after that, just to serve as a beacon in the black if I got too far away again.  Ambient light has prevented it since, to the point that I was able to do some orbital construction on the dark side for an experimental vessel I'd forgotten to include construction lights on.

[Snark]

I run with PlanetShine installed, and one of the thing it does by default is to make the dark side of things genuinely dark.  It gets seriously black.

And I find that I actually like it that way-- feels more real to me, somehow.  And it adds to the challenge.  Gives me the choice between either designing my missions so that I do everything where sunlight's available, or else I need to design my craft to have floodlights or spotlights on them, so I can actually see what I'm doing.  Gives me more of a reason to put lights on the ship.

[regex]

Darkness is one of the challenges of spaceflight. Like a lot of other things that make spaceflight so challenging, KSP gets it wrong. You can mod these things in and make even a vanilla-ish toy solar system pretty challenging. It becomes one more thing to add to your checklist, increasing immersion and the penalty for failure.

[cantab]

Yes, but in real life you don't have to visually identify a fuel tank from the outside of your spacecraft in order to turn off its valves, or any of the other myriad things we do in KSP by right-clicking parts. And no, I don't think that adding an entirely new system to do those things just to keep regex happy would be a good use of development time and effort.

[KerikBalm]

Well, with part highlighting, even in pitch black, I can usually find the part I want on my craft... usually...