Better ambient lighting possible?

Yes.  Yes it is.

I've figured out how to make the lighting much more realistic by forcing objects (ships, asteroids, and such) to only be lit by the directional light given off by the nearby star.

Also... I am able to change the lighting to accurately reflect the light color used in the nebula texture file... pretty sweet.

In the above pic you can plainly see that the desaturating glow effect is greatly reduced, and that the asteroid looks red... that's purely a lighting effect from the red star. 


When rotating the camera behind the asteroid, like so:

It's nearly black.  Which is closer to how it should be.  Unfortunately, it's not possible to have a directional light coming from the planet.

Of course, this requires new textures for asteroids (which are shown these screenshots) because I darkened the asteroid textures a lot in beta version 2 of the asteroid retex... and, I'll be forced to merge the asteroid retex in with the nebulas retex because the lighting changes directly affects both.