If we can see the Milky Way on earth when there’s dark skies, why can’t we see it from the moon? All the videos and photos I’ve seen, it’s just black with no stars.
In: Physics
The astronauts on the moon said they could see stars, so it isn’t that they were invisible, they just didn’t show up in pictures. On Earth you don’t see many stars in daytime because the atmosphere creates a sort of “lampshade” affect, and the atmosphere being lit up means most stars are blocked out, but on the Moon with no air, the stars can punch through.
This eye/picture difference is down to the difference between your eyes and a camera. Your eyes send a message to your brain about 20-30 times/second, and your brain does a sort of photoshop process to combine all the information into what you “see”.
A camera can only focus on one thing at a time, however. If you are in broad daylight and take a picture, the camera shows the image fine. If you are in the dark, it might turn on a flash or lengthen the shutter time. But if you are in the dark and cover the flash, the camera has no idea, it takes the picture assuming there is enough light– and you get a dark image.
But unlike a camera, your eyes do dark/light images several times/second and combine them together without you being conscious of it. In order to do that with a camera, you would have to manually take a picture at multiple settings and photoshop them together after.
For the cameras they took to the Moon, they were all pre-set to take pictures of full sun. They were not open long enough for the fainter stars to show up. If they had taken pictures of the stars, the Moon and astronauts would have just been whited out from too much light in the foreground.
Some more/better info here:
[https://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2019/why-are-there-no-stars.html](https://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2019/why-are-there-no-stars.html)
[https://www.space.com/first-to-the-moon-apollo-8-movie.html](https://www.space.com/first-to-the-moon-apollo-8-movie.html)
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