My father asked this question a little while ago and I’ve wondered about it before too. When you see pictures of the earth (from say the moon) it always looks like it’s in an inky blacky void. Do the cameras just not pick up the light of the surrounding stars or is it something more natural, like the glow the earth blocking out the stars?
The Earth is much brighter than most anything else in the sky. If the camera was set to capture the light from stars, the Earth would appear as a big bright spot with no details.
If you expose film correctly for a very bright object you lose the ability to retain detail in darker areas. If you expose for the darker areas a bright object will become washed out, again with no detail. I would guess that the background stars are rather feint against the planet so you would have to expose for one or the other. You cannot get both exposed properly at the same time.
As optically poor as human are eyes are they are in some respects still superior to any camera and dynamic range is a good example. We can view a scene with a wider range of bright to dark than cameras. Black and white film is probably best followed by color negatives then color transparencies with digitical ranging from pretty good to much, much worse.
Are there any photos out there of a picture of the dark side of the Earth with stars behind it?