Why can’t you see any stars on the moon?
Ah, but you can if you wait till night time! You can’ t see any stars in photographs taken from the Apollo missions because they were all taken in broad daylight. As any photographer will tell you, a camera can only cope with a narrow range of brightnesses, so that the aperture setting and shutter speed are very important if a photograph is not to be over- or under-exposed for given lighting conditions. In this age of automatic point-and-click digital cameras that adjust these settings automatically, we tend to forget that one fact. And of course, even though the stars are much brighter and steadier in space, thanks to a lack of atmospheric scattering, they’re still extremely faint compared to the sun. A camera with settings sensitive enough to photograph the stars would be blinded by a candle. It’s no wonder that in the broad harsh daylight conditions of the moon, no stars can be seen in photographs. They’re there of course, but almost completely underexposed!
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