Backgrounds don't load?

Um ok, I went to the space port alpha and went to take a look at the planets.

In someone else's screenshots, there was actual black space. But when I visited there, it was still that blue sky. I actually don't know why.. mabie because of my poor connection(it's cable btw).

If your client knows that there are background prims, they will appear grey. Sometimes it takes a minute for your machine to realize there are prims there at all and you'll see straight through to the sky.

It may be your connection, the sim lagging and not sending you the data, or your system dropping bits of the stream. It's all UDP so there's no acknowledement from your client back to the server that prim data was recieved. If the server sent it once, that's all you get.

Leave the sim, clear your cache on the Network tab in Preferences (ctrl-P), relog, and go back. See if that puts you in the black.