I’m new to tiktok and I get a lot of flat earth videos. In several of them, they constantly talk about the lack of stars visible from the ISS videos. Ive heard that its due to the light reflecting from White sides of the ISS, but if thats the case, wouldnt that prevent us from seeing stars from earth? TIA
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> wouldnt that prevent us from seeing stars from earth?
Yeah, it does. Why do you think you can’t see stars during the day? It is the same reason, it is so bright that the light from the stars is drowned out. When the ISS is lit by the sun it is as bright as broad daylight because that is what it is; it is directly lit by the sun.
Cameras are not particularly good at picking up dim lights, especially when other brighter objects are around. Stars are very dim.
Human eyes do have trouble with this contrast too, but not as much as your average camera. During the day or in a bright room the stars can be very hard to see or downright invisible.
Cameras have settings to determine how much light they let in.
If they let in too much light, the whole thing is just a bright blur.
If they let in too little, you can’t see anything.
When the ISS is on the side of earth facing the sun, a lot of light is reflecting off everything. If they want to take a photo of something they set the cameras so they let in just enough light so you can see the thing as something more detailed than a bright blur. But this setting is not enough for you to see the stars.
If they’re on the dark side and looking at cities at night (which are bright but not that bright). [They set the cameras so you see the cities really pretty, but hardly any stars.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG0fTKAqZ5g)
When they look at stars. [They set the camera so you see stars really pretty, but the cities are just an orange blur.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RdwaRz6bko)
If you can see the outside of the ISS in a video, they’re filming it in daylight.
You can’t see the stars for the same reason you can’t see the stars in daylight on Earth. I don’t know about you but I’ve never seen any stars during the day.
People got confused by this with the Moon landings too. People think it’s night because the sky wasn’t blue. But the Moon landings happened during the lunar daytime. So no stars.
The night sky is far richer from orbit.
Most of us only get to see space via cameras. Cameras have a limited *dynamic range*, meaning objects whose brightness differs more than a certain amount aren’t visible in an image at the same time. In daylight, Earth’s surface is far brighter than the stars. So any image in which the Earth is properly exposed will show simply a black sky in the background. And in any image where stars are visible, Earth’s surface will be over-exposed and totally washed out.
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