Awesome

Not even as an easter egg? You could've sold it with telling them Vincent Van Gogh's paintings had the location of stars accurately, you were inspired by those paintings to reproduce the sky color accurately.

A past coworker who worked on Cobalt[1] told me that they spent entirely too much time implementing stars in the sky of the game with some amount of real(ish) star system physics behind them. I can understand people removing polish things like that if there are usability concerns, but those small things add up to a lot in an end product and are a joy to find and explore. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_(video_game)

To be honest I don’t think anyone wants that kind of functionality - maybe in the satellite view but not in the vector map.

Yep, if you have to draw the Sun, you better draw it yellow. If you have to draw a cloudless day sky, you better draw it blue. That doesn't apply to every single instance of those, but if the sky isn't the focus of your application, a realistic one is just a distraction.

Ironically, I'm in the South of England wih clear blue sky, and the site thinks I have a much darker and beautiful reddish sunset. Im fairness, it's probably only out by an hour if that.

I’ve had similar issues at work where people really overdo something and it’s difficult. On one hand you never want to kill that joy and passion someone has. That’s a great characteristic. But projects have scopes and too often instructions like “just draw a blue rectangle” get ignored.

This is why specifications are important, and why design is important. The reality is that we have certain conventions that are immediately understandable, and that too much visual complexity results in confusion rather than clarity. If the sky is hazy white when I expect it to be blue, I'm confused as to whether it's the sky or if the map is still loading. It's adding cognitive complexity for no reason. Stars similarly serve no functional purpose at night. What you built sounds great for an actual planetary view like Google Earth. And it sounds fun to build. But it's an anti-feature for a navigation view. When you're navigating, simplicity and clarity are paramount. Not realism.

The thing here is programming the job can be much more dull than programming the hobby. Occasionally (twice a decade) there can be a collision where you get to do something really cool like that at work. The higher ups want a realistic sky because their market research said it'll boost an OKR by 10 basis points. And then you are in luck! That said there are niches where jobs let you do cool stuff all the time. Hard to find. Probably why gaming jobs are notoriously underpaid and overworked.