Dath ilan is too good at coordination to have either lots of aerosols in the atmosphere or lots of high-scattering non-red lights on at night all the time, and Keltham has ever been a tourist in clear cold high places where the stars are brighter yet. It's not a new sight to him, except of course in the sense that -
"The patterns of the suns are different," Keltham murmurs. He didn't get around to checking last night, with all the various rushes. "I was wondering if this was a parallel timeslice of my own planet, in my own -" Taldane doesn't have a word that means galaxy - "larger structure of suns. Didn't seem likely, but - anyway, it's definitely not." Dath ilan doesn't have the notion of 'constellations' in quite the same way, but he doesn't see any of the patterns that a dath ilani would use to identify the Northern Star or Southern Star or the direction of a meteor shower.