Why when looking at any photograph actually taken from space are there no stars in the photo.?

Question

Most important image I've seen is a picture from the moon looking at the earth. No stars are visible in the black spce around the earth. We see them when looking at the moon, so why not the other direction.

Even pictures from the shuttle of astronauts in space walk mode don't have stars in the background.

Answer 1

it is the difference in brightness between the stars and any astronaut, cosmonaut, space shuttle, or international space station. the stars are just too dim. a much longer exposure time is needed to photograph dimmer objects. ask someone who knows about photography.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography

Answer 2

Because the stars are to dim. You can see the stars and Moon in the sky at the same time, but can you PHOTOGRAPH both? If you try, you will quickly find that you need a very short exposure for the Moon and a very long exposure for the stars. If you choose to expose long enough to see stars, the Moon will just look like a bloated over exposed blob. If you choose the short exposure, the Moon will look nice but no stars at all will show in the photo. Cameras are just not as good at seeing bright and dim objects at the same time as your eye.

By the way, I attended a talk given by a shuttle astronaut and he spoke about seeing stars in space. He said you can see them, but you have to look when the shuttle is on the night side of Earth because sunlight coming in the windows and the bright Earth below dazzles your eyes enough to hid the stars on the daytime side. And you have to turn off the lights in the shuttle, otherwise it is just like looking out the window of your home at night with the lights on in the house. All you see is black sky and reflections of the interior off the glass.

Answer 3

It usually has to do with the sensitivity of the film or chip in the camera. The bright light reflected from an astronaut's suit, or the shuttle, or space station, etc. is bright enough to wash out the light from the stars. This is similar to the brightening of the morning sky - the brighter it becomes, the harder it is to make out the stars.

The Earth in the photograph you mentioned is very bright, as is the surface of the Moon fromwhich it was taken. These two bright objects wash out the starlight.

Answer 4

Space photography either in space or from earth, requires time exposures to get the stars. A bright object like the moon and earth the shutter speed is only a few seconds, not long enough to get the faint star light. To leave the shutter open long enough for starlight, the bright objects would be over exposed.

Answer 5

Hmm, good question. I don't actually know, but my speculation is as follows:

our own atmosphere has a magnification effect on stars and the moon, so they appear several times larger then they should. The moon's atmosphere is very thin, and thus wouldn't magnify these objects at all, or very little.

as for any other images, its possible they'd be located in areas of space where stars are too far away to see.

Answer 6

All photographic film or CCD imaging devices have what's called an "exposure latitude", a range of exposures where it is most sensitive to light and will record an image properly. When you photograph something in bright, open sunlight on Earth almost everything is evenly lit because it's being lit by the same source, namely the Sun. But you may notice that you lose some of the detail of objects in deep shadow; and if you adjust your camera's exposure to pick up those details lost in shadow, then everything in the sunlit areas is badly washed out and overexposed. This is because film or CCD chips cannot adjust automatically for these kinds of broad differences in lighting like our eyes can.

The stars are relatively dim objects because they are so far away. Even when you step out from the brightly lit interior of your house into the dark of your backyard at night it takes some adjustment on the part of your eyes to adapt to the dimmer light and to see the stars. Film can't do this; it has to be set initially for a an averaged exposure level or special filters have to be used such as graduated neutral density filters to obtain a useable exposure. Even then, obtaining a correct exposure is a trade off between the desired clarity of an image and what the film or CCD chip is capable of recording. To record the stars at night, astrophotographers have to make exposures of several minutes or even hours to record the images of stars on film simply because film is so much less sensitive than our eyes. "Faster" films have been developed for shorter exposure times, but then you tend to get photos that are much grainier looking or you run into a problem called reciprocity failure.

When photo's are taken in space, the film in the camera is chosen to record subjects that are usually light in colour (astronauts in spacesuits; they're usually white to reflect the intense light of the Sun and ease the heating load on the spacesuit) and lit by a very bright source of light, namely the Sun. Also, the aperature of the camera's shutter (ie., the hole through which the light passes) will likely be set at a high number (meaning a tiny hole; an f/8 aperature means a bigger hole than say an f/16 or f/32) to record the maximum amount of background detail, say the rest of the spacecraft or the landscape/moonscape/planetscape that they've landed on. So the camera is set up to record a brightly lit object - astronaut - next to a brightly lit spacecraft or standing on a brightly lit landscape backed by an absolutely pitch black sky in which there are stars shining, but are washed out by all of the ambient light being reflected off of objects in the foreground. They could try to set up the camera to record the stars, but again the exposure for a film designed to record brightly lit objects would have to be several seconds or minutes long, and all of the objects in the foregroud, including the ground itself, would become featureless white blobs of glare, and would likely wash out the entire scene anyway. The only way to effectively take photo's of the stars on the moon would be to wait for the night to come just as we do on Earth; but in the case of the Moon, you'd have to wait some two weeks for it to arrive!

Hope this answers your question.

N.

Answer 7

Stars seems like close to us from Earth, but they really are not that close. Sun is the closest star of the solar system. Other stars are billions of light years far away that's why they can't be seen in picture.

Answer 8

The camera only focuses on the Earth. Also the stars probably aren't bright enough to see.

Answer 9

The stars are not bright enough to show in the photo.

Answer 10

the moon landings were faked. I thought every body knew that.