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Comment by galaxyLogic | Hacker News Reader

But, there are no stars in any of the pictures taken on the Moon, the sky is black, even though there is no atmosphere, and these were Hasselblads. There are many beautiful pictures of starry sky taken on Earth, then why no stars show up in the pictures taken on Moon with the best cameras of the time, and no atmospheric interference?

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There are no stars because the exposure was set for intense sunlight against which stars are many orders of magnitude dimmer. Try photographing stars in a night scene lit by a bright security light - they won't be visible

Yep! Although, that said, I wonder what the astronaut's eyes saw when they were on the surface? Could they see the stars, or were their eyes adjusted to the brightness so much so that they couldn't? I know that they had visors... so maybe?

Yes perhaps. It doesn't make much sense if they were blinded by light on the most important scientific mission ever.

Does anybody know if any of the astronauts were asked in an interview about how the sky and stars looked from the moon?

You can test this with a camera at home. Take a single exposure photo of the full moon so that it’s exposed correctly (the looney 11 rule can be helpful), then count how many stars show up.

Couldn't they have taken the picture in the shadow of their capsule and point the camera at the stars? Because of no atmosphere to reflect sunlight I think they could have easily captured beautiful images of brightest stars ever.

Maybe they just didn't think of that. In hindsight that would have been a great thing to do, to show us how sky looks from the Moon. They were scientists after all and they were supposed to document what they saw, including the stars they saw, I would think. And there were multiple missions to Moon. Why didn't anybody think of doing such a simple thing?

I would think that if I were on moon and looked up I would say "Wow I've never seen stars shine so brightly, I better take a picture so I can show folks back home ..."

SEEN: https://www.etsy.com/listing/757288317/milky-way-starry-nigh...

> Couldn’t they have ...

> Why didn't anybody think of doing such a simple thing?

Your second test at home is to take a photo of the stars. Bonus points if you can do it in one photo and with technology that existed in 1969.

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