As mentioned in another thread, this photo is one of the most famous in history. My question is: Where are the stars? It’s obviously daytime, though without an atmosphere, shouldn’t the stars still be visible? Or does it have to do with the camera’s shutter speed being fast enough to capture the earth and moon, causing it to be too fast to capture the stars?
Here is another photo of the earth, and the stars are visible.
I think that 2nd one has been manipulated. Earth is way too big.
The proper exposure for the Earth and Moon is way too short to show the stars. the second image is just “artwork” - it’s not a photograph.
In the first picture which land mass is visible?
It must be this. A quick google image search for photographs of the moon doesn’t show any where you can clearly see stars. Basically the moon is far brighter than anything else in the night sky, and orders of magnitude brighter than most stars that would be visible to the naked eye. I assume that the apparent magnitude of Earth, as seen from the moon, would be comparable or even greater.
Stars are very faint. Try looking out the window at night, with your room lights on. You can’t see any stars because your eyes are adjusted to the room lights, and the stars are much dimmer than that. Now consider that the moon and earth are both lit by direct sunlight, which is hundreds (or thousands) of times brighter than your room lights.
The second photo is obviously fake. Not only did someone add fake stars to the sky, they added some to the night side of the earth as well.
Not only are the stars visible - the bottom half of the Earth is missing! Seriously, stars are showing right through where the bottom half of the Earth should be!
It’ll be this one. The shutter speed for that photo looks to me like it’s going to be (assuming ISO 100 @f/16) about around 1/60-1/125 of a second, give or take. Deep space objects like stars are many orders of magnitude dimmer. From earth, the difference between the moon and even a relatively nearby planet like Saturn is about 8 stops (so you’d need an exposure of about 2 seconds to get Saturn equally exposed.) Once you get to deep space objects, we’re looking at exposure times of dozens of minutes to hours. At any rate, way, way outside the contrast range. If you exposed for the stars, the earth and moon would just be a big, featureless, overexposed mess (completely white). If you expose for the earth and moon (as in this picture), the stars are far too dark to register.
Here is another photo of the earth, and the stars are visible.
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That looks like a composite to me. If you took two separate photos, one exposed for the stars, and one exposed for the earth, you could theoretically combine the two into a photo similar to that. But that looks to me like a composite of at least two, if not probably three, pictures taken from different sources.
:smack: Damn, I should have noticed that.
An exposure that would show the stars would also have the Earth way over exposed. It would show up as a super-bright blurry blob.
I blame Lex Luthor.
Nasa faked the existance of Earth.
But yeah, one thing photography teaches you is the amazing dynamic range of the human eye - or perhaps just the brain’s ability to make sense of it. Things that seem to us to be not that different in terms of brightness level because our brain sort of normalizes it turn out to be vastly different when you’re trying to operate a camera and properly expose one or the other. Your brain/eye can put elements with far varying brightness levels together into one cohesive image than any objective light-capturing tool can.
It’s a fake, like all the other spaceflight and lunar-landing photos. NASA was soooo stupid* that in their massively funded hoax, they forgot to put stars in the pictures!
I believe that is Africa. North pole to the right, and Antarctica visible on the left edge at about 10 O’Clock.
It looks to me, on first guess, like Africa. I interpret the lower edge of the visible Earth as the sunset terminator, running north-south from about Libya to South Africa. The far western part of the Sahara is brightly lit and free of cloud, just above the terminator and right of centre, showing Morocco and Algeria. To the left of that, greener lands are visible through the clouds - Mauritania, Mali, and so on southward (leftward in the image). Through another gap in the cloud, the Atlantic coast of Angola and Namibia is visible. Near the top Centre of the lit portion of the Earth, I’m pretty sure part of South America is visible. North America is over the horizon, and Iberia is obscured by cloud.
You’re right - I didn’t pick Antarctica out out the cloud there. And I would have beat you to posting if I hadn’t spent so much time undoing the autocorrect errors 
It is not the brain “normalizing” it into any “cohesive image” (which does not exist, as modern experiments on change blindness show), it is the brain moving the eyes. Foveal vision, which is what is in play here, only covers about 2º, about the size of your thumbnail held at arms length, and not too far off the angular size of the Moon as seen from Earth. Move your eyes a few degrees to look at a star and the Moon is no longer stimulating the fovea, and thus no longer able to swamp out the star’s image there. While you are staring right at a full Moon, though, you will not see the stars (but mainly simply because you are just not looking at them).
Yes, the dynamic range of the eye is large, and (within limits) it adapts very quickly, but this is not due to any “normalization” in the brain. Seeing is not creating an “image” in the brain, it is extracting information from the visual environment. Although its pure optics may seem camera-like, the eye does not, in fact, function like a camera, and most of the retinal image is used for little else than detecting movement on the periphery, so that the fovea can be turned towards it to check it out. For this reason, issues of “exposure” and light level do not affect the eyes in the same way that they affect cameras.
That is western Africa. North is to the right.
They didn’t forget. They hoaxed the moon landing in the Arizona desert. The stars are reflecting back the light they are picking up from the towns and streetlights where you are standing on Earth. It’s too dark in the middle of the desert.
I read it on some website about alien abduction. You have to know a lot about space when you’re talking about aliens.
