HDR Lighting and Realistic Relative Brightness

[MDPKH]

Distant Objects Enhanced offers a partial fix for the issue of relative brightness, by dimming the stars when the sun or the day side of a celestial body is visible on the screen. What actually makes the stars visible or not in real life is the overall brightness of the scene and the camera's (or our eyes') adjustment to that overall brightness. But that affects everything, not just stars. If the stars are visible, anything lit by sunlight should be blindingly bright, even your own spacecraft. If the camera is adjusted to daylight, then sunlit things like the day side of Kerbin and your spacecraft should appear at a reasonable brightness; however, not only should the stars be too dim to see, but that also goes for emissive effects like hot engines and capsule windows if the lights are on inside. Seriously, if a crewed vessel is in broad daylight, the windows shouldn't appear pale yellow because of interior lighting. That has bugged me for a long time.

The most complete way to fix this is to properly simulate the significant differences in brightness between stars & emissive effects, sunlit objects, and the Sun itself, and then have a global brightness multiplier that is actively adjusted to keep the scene at an overall reasonable brightness. I'm not sure if Unity has limitations preventing this, but HDR has been a part of some video games for a long time now, so I suspect it's possible.