Why can't you take pictures of stars in space with a camera?

Question

In all the nasa photographs i have seen (apart from the hubble telescope) there are never any stars visable,yet i have manged to take pictures of stars with a small lens digital camera,ok the pictures where very very faint.
in space there is no light pollution so why no picturesof any stars?
and i am not trying to prove anything or disprove anything about moon landings or any other conspiracies .
I just wondered why there are no pictures of stars including shuttle video footage (apart from the hubble telescope pictures)?

Answer 1

When you are photographing an object illuminated by the Sun, it's so bright that, in order to get correct exposure, objects like stars have to be so underexposed that they just don't register on the film or CCD. Photographing stars correctly requires a very, very sensitive exposure; if they used that for normal space images the objects of attention in the images would be enormously overexposed.

Answer 2

You can but you would need the right lens and shutter setting. If you take a regular old camera outside and point it at the night sky and snap a quick shot you will most likely not see any stars in the developed photo, maybe just one or two very bright ones.

In space, the astronauts were taking photos of either very close objects, such as eachother or their equipment, or of very large bright objects, such as the Earth or Moon.

By the way, while it's true that many dim stars are only visible from Earth due to the atmosphere, this is not true of all stars. Pleanty of stars are visible from space as long as you are on the dark side of a planet, shielded from the sun's glare.

Answer 3

Do you have any idea how dim the stars are compared to most of the things we see in everyday life? Just because the sky is black doesn't mean you can see them.

Here, try this experiment: The next time you wake up in the middle of the night try to look out your window. Make sure it's open and the screen is down so there's nothing between you and the sky. Hopefully you see stars, right?

Now turn on the light. I bet you couldn't even *see* the stars with the lights on. The sky looks very black, right? Now imagine how much harder it would be with your room filled with sunlight. The astronauts are outside, remember?

It takes a very sensitive and/or long exposure camera to see the stars. (The eye is a very well-designed piece of machinery that's only recently been equaled)

The brilliance of the sunlit astronauts, shuttle, and earth would absolutely blind such a sensitively-set camera. The Hubble, that you mentioned, is the king of all sensitive cameras, and can only be used at night.


Here's another, SOHO spacecraft:

http://www.spaceweather.com/images2006/14nov06/20061114_1718_c3.gif

Answer 4

If u look at any pictures taken from space it is always black in the background. NASA edits the photos and takes out the back ground. How can u take a picture from earth of the stars and see them but if u take it from space u can't, when u look at photos from the moon u can see across the whole photo all the little plus sighns that are even across and up and down, that is how they edit the photos. The moon has giant mountains cliffs it is not flat with wholes there is a lot more than u see. Idk why they don't want us seeing all the stars around the earth but they don't. It has nothing to do with earth or the sun, the stars have been removed! Look up dark sky preserve and there are pictures from I phones that are showing multie stars, if we had no light pollution we could easily ale pictures of the stars from earth so for anyone to say that the earth and sun block out the stars is a bunch of bull crock there are MILLIONS of stars but not one shows up? Think about it.

Answer 5

Basically, the stars are very far apart , and when pictures are taken by the hubble telescope or from a shuttle, the focus is on a particular object in a relatively small area of the sky, and there may not be a star in the immediate vicinity. However, most pictures DO show stars. They are the bright, cross-shaped objects you see in Hubble pictures of nebulae for instance. When you take a picture from the ground, ALL the stars in the frame, thousands, will of course show! Remember, it's pretty big out there! Where you see two stars an inch or two apart, they are in reality hundred or thousands of light years apart. If a telescope is focused on an object between those two stars, then of course you wont see either of them. Get the picture? If you want to see great pictures of stars, planets, nebulae, individual or whole fields of galaxies, take a look at www.space.com
It'll blow your mind!

Answer 6

As you said, in space, there is not any light pollution, but in order to see stars you also need an atmosphere of a planet, so the light from the travelling stars will have something to bounce and reflect on, making them visible.

The Hubble Telescope is (or was) in a somewhat high orbit of the Earth, but still within its outer atmosphere, where the gravity is far less than we would feel, and was kept there by booster rockets to keep it from crashing into Earth, and could still take photographs because the charged electrons in the atmosphere around it still gave the star's light enough cause to be reflected.

I know that is not a particularly good written scientific answer, but it does have to do with planetary atmospheres, charged electrons, atoms etcetera.

Answer 7

The photos taken from the moon or while orbiting earth or even travelling between them don't show stars because the light from the sun and even the light reflected from the earth is too strong.

Photos are based on light. If there is a powerful light source, such as the sun or earth or moon reflecting sun light, then it overexposes the film making it impossible to capture the far more feeble light from the stars.

Answer 8

They can take pictures of stars, but if they did, everything else would be over exposed, and it is everything else, like the astronaut, the Earth, the Moon or the space craft, that they want to take a picture of. So they expose for that and not the stars.

Answer 9

The tiny amount of light we receive from stars takes a long time to register on almost any kind of camers you use..... the human eye can do it in a few seconds but film and CCDs take a minute to register that small an amount of light. Use a long exposure for better photos.

Answer 10

Whilst all the answers are correct they all miss one important fact. It's daylight. Apart from the sun, how many stars can you see during the daytime.