Is there a mod that has decent textures for tx_sun_05.dds and tx_sun_flash_grey_05.dds?

The ones I've found have a lot of problems:
1. They are DXT3 or something, which is a waste since they don't need alpha: DXT1c would be adequate.
2. They have horrible banding instead of a smooth gradient. If you hold something like an ebony shield up to the sun the bands of light overlapping it look really bad.
3. They don't trail off to RGB=(0,0,0) at the edges, but instead to a merely dark color. The result is a sometimes-visible giant square overlapping everything. (The Richer Textures mod doesn't have this problem, but it is kinda low-res and has banding.)
4. I'm not certain but I think allowing R, G, and B to vary slightly from white could improve the gradient even more, i.e. a finer gradation of luminance = (0.3R + 0.6G + 0.1B) can be achieved if R, G, and B can vary slightly.

With my skills, instead of using something like a gimp or photoshop gradient, It would actually be easier for me to write a C++ program to dump out a TGA with a radial gradient computed based on a formula. This should basically be done in sRGB color space and not linear space right?

well i'm also not that happy with the one i have..
i have not looked much at those textures, but my first guess would be they need an alpha channel ..

Is it possible you could get me a screenshot of the banding problem? I can try to fix it, but as I did nothing to the sun textures other than convert them to DDS it seems like this was a problem with the textures from the start.

they do need an alpha channel.. otherwise you'd get a square sun, not so natural looking i would think

i'm using a sun http://piclair.com/data/1tiaz.jpg from STALKER complete mod (for Stalker: CoP), it looks really good imo, a nice, vague red halo around it too.

>they do need an alpha channel

I'm not so sure. The original Morrowind.bsa has A=255 everywhere for both textures, as does the Richer Textures mod. Neither result in a gigantic squarish sun. Quite possibly X8R8G8B8 or DXT1c will work fine and the object is contributing additively, such that black texels are the same as transparent ones.

>Is it possible you could get me a screenshot of the banding problem?

I'm not going to bother with in-game screenshots because just using WTV.exe or another DDS viewer outside the game shows blatant banding. I count about a dozen bands in Richer Textures tx_sun_flash_grey_05.dds. Such banding is not visible in the original Morrowind.bsa textures. The problem might just be due to DXT compression.

Nope.

Morrowind's textures for the sun, fire, and many other glowing particles don't have alpha. This is possible because the textures are set up to only increase the brightness of whatever they're viewed over, by whatever amount and color that part of the texture happens to be, and if any part of the texture is black it increases the brightness of whatever's behind it by 0 and shows up as invisible.

I've tested them without an alpha (by mistake) and it gave me a huge square sun that would cover my view almost completely lol

I also checked my folder with the default morrowind textures, both sun files had an alpha channel.

Do the moons work the same way? Because technically the moons should be transparent, but they never were for me, I've tried so many things, using just the vanilla moons, messing with the alphas, but they never appear transparent for me.

See Vurt's reply... I think I was wrong anyway.