After reading a post on reddit about night lights, and more specifically how bad they look on earth, I decided to give a try at making my own. Working from NASA pictures, I remade the texture with 2 main objectives:
- As realistic as possible on Earth
- Impossible to distinguish Earth shape on other planets.



A entirely new texture for the night lights, built from official NASA pictures.
Resolution is 4K (4096x2048), twice the size of the original, but shouldn't pose ny problem, many textures are in this format.
Before:

After:



The mod is completely save game compatible, you can activate/deactivate the mod without any impact.










This mod, as it stands, should NOT conflict with ANY other mod.
Achievement compatible.

• 1.1:
  
- Reverted compression to DXT5, lowering the filsize
- Now have the proper alpha channel

• 1.1.1:
  
- Lights will not be red anymore and should be now in a more traditional yellow shade
- Added some lights in some areas of the world according to population growth in the future - india, african coast especially Nigeria, maghreb, chinese coast as well as south east asia.

Stellaris wiki
PDX forums
NASA website


Gimp
Nasalization font
GifCam