The glare only matters if you take a photo where the ground appears in the frame - if you pointed the camera straight at a part of the sky (also without the Earth or Sun in the frame), it should be perfectly possible to get good photos of stars.
Not necessarily. Part of the reason Earth telescopes are so massive is because they have to withstand Earth’s strong gravity–not just to keep them pointed in the right direction, but to minimize even the tiniest distortions of the mirror. They also need protection against the elements, light pollution, and so on. I suspect Apollo could have landed a ~1 m scope and required support infrastructure without too much trouble; maybe as a substitute for the rover in some cases (that’s 210 kg of mass).
That said, there’s not all that much point in putting a scope on the moon when you can just leave it in space.
You’ll also want a fantastic anti-reflective coating for the internals of the camera. Bright lights outside the field of view can still cause lens flare and other artifacts.
The glare also matters if the camera lens is illuminated by sunlight or by the surroundings. Even if the sun or landscape is not in the frame of the picture, imperfections and dust on the lens will scatter light into the picture. You can only take a photo of the Milky Way if you carefully shade the lens, so that the lens surface is not illuminated by the sun or the surrounding landscape.
The night sky would look exactly the same. You’ve barely moved a hair on the grand scale of things…although the sky would be light-pollution free.
Imagine someone proposing that a good sized telescope be sent up on an Apollo mission. Adding billions of dollars to the cost of the mission. The added weight, etc., increasing the risks.
The longest time spent on the Moon was a bit over 3 days.
After that, the scope is abandoned. No CCDs in those days. It’d have to be film physically installed and brought back.
Oh, and the Moon is a very dusty place. The first mission would clearly not drag the scope along. And Aldrin and Armstrong would make it clear how the dust got everywhere.
How are you going to setup and use a telescope with the dust trying to coat everything? Esp. with the harsh sunlight bouncing and rebouncing off the dust?
Oh, and you have to take the film to the Moon and back. With increased cosmic ray radiation plus the Van Allen belts. So, better bring some nice lead containers. Those won’t add any weight.
What has a telescope got to do with taking a photo of the Milky Way? Magnification isn’t the problem.
Thanks for that info. It is illuminating. The 2.8 aperture works but a much slower shutter speed is required to gather the light from the Milky Way. As far as a tripod is concerned, heck, a bean bag sitting on the rover would work. Or just figure out a spot on the lander itself to place the camera.
Yeah, I wasn’t sure about the reflection from Earth. But just like we on Earth can take a photo of the Milky Way with a full moon by waiting for when the moon is low on the horizon but daylight hasn’t yet occurred, they could’ve timed it similarly.
Haha.
The point is not that you could potentially have gotten a Milky Way shot, but rather you could get a Milky Way shot with something in the foreground clearly identifying that it was shot from the moon’s surface!
Maybe. But if the surface was in darkness? What about a Milky Way shot with the planted flag in the foreground? Or the upper part of the lander? Wouldn’t that be an awesome shot?
Plus, don’t forget that film developers were quite adept at dodging and burning a negative to accentuate highlights and darken bright areas. Ansel Adams was a master at it. The quality of film they were using has a pretty wide dynamic range. It still seems to me that it would’ve been technically possible, and I wonder why they didn’t take the time to capture such an impressive photo. They certainly took the time to take other impressive photos.
Maybe the Occam’s Razor answer (per scr4’s post) is that they didn’t bother to bring a camera that would allow long exposure times. That drives the photographer in me completely crazy!
The dynamic range of a sun illuminated foreground versus a star field exceed anything any film or sensor can manage. Dodging and burning in can manage a stop or two. You are looking at a dozen stops or more. No film technology can mange that. If you correctly exposed the foreground there is a very good chance that there would be no detectable change to the film in the sky areas at all. Just never enough photons ever hitting to do anything in the time needed. *
Star fields with a Hasselblad would be easy otherwise. As noted just propping the camera somewhere, and ensuring it was in shadow, would be good enough. But you would need a time exposure of some minutes minimum to get a useful field. The modern milky-way pictures done with modern digital cameras beat anything you can manage with film. For one thing - they don’t suffer from reciprocity failure*, and they can be much more sensitive.
- Film (ie silver halide) technology detects light in a two step process. You need two photons to hit the grain within a short period of time of one another to cause the photo-conversion of the silver. If you get one photon, and the second does not arrive in time the grain reverts to its ground state and no record of the light’s arrival is retained. Thus it is actually possible to expose film to a very very low light level for as long as you like, and it will remain unexposed. In the zone between ordinary exposures and extreme time exposures this effect results in a loss of sensitivity of the film - this effect is known as reciprocity failure (or sometimes, incorrectly, as the reciprocity effect.) The effective film speed will easily halve and often much worse.
One useful thing about the moon, it turns on its axis rather slower than the Earth, so there would be no need to guide a sky shot. Even a sky field with a 70mm lens will show discernible star tracks after a few minutes when shot from the Earth. On the moon you would probably get way with an hour. Actually a 70mm lens would have been a bit too long to get a really good field. 40mm would have much more spectacular for a milky way.
I hate to nitpick your otherwise excellent post, but your times are way off.
For a 35mm frame, a 24mm lens will show noticeable star tracks in as little as 15 seconds. This is on a 36 MPix sensor, which is maybe 2x the resolution of ISO 100 film. So, I’ll give you 30 seconds max at 24mm.
A 24mm lens on a FF camera gives a FOV of 84° diagonal.
An 80mm lens on the 6x6 camera used on the Moon give a diagonal field of view of 53°.
The equivalent focal length lens for the Hasselblad would be around 45mm, a focal length that Apollo didn’t carry (from here: Hasselblad Historical - Focal length comparisons).
If you used the 80mm lens, exposures would have to be under 10 seconds to not have streaking (on Earth).
Yeah, it has been so long since I made any such exposures, and I usually mount the camera on a tracker, so I pulled the numbers from deep memory, and got them from somewhere a bit lower in the anatomy.
“Hey guys, landing on the moon was great and all, but we’re god-damned Americans. We haven’t conquered the moon until we’ve landed a car on it. What do you say we build a rover we can fold up and strap to the side of the LEM?”
“But that will cost billions! Do you realize how many precious scientific instruments that will displace?”
“We’re. Putting. A. Car. On. The. Moon.”
I assume you’re aware that they already brought back a crapload of film. The radiation wasn’t really a big deal.
At any rate, Apollo 16 did in fact land a small ultraviolet telescope. Only a 3-inch aperture, but enough to be useful–far UV light doesn’t penetrate Earth’s atmosphere well. They obviously solved the various problems of dust, heat, etc. The only question was the mass allowance. They surely could have had a much larger scope, but it would mean some other instrument got the shaft.
Getting back to the OP, this document shows a number of starfields taken with their UV scope. In particular, figure 13-15 is aimed at roughly the center of the Milky Way, and shows a dense starfield.
Thanks. Excellent information.
And 10 seconds would’ve been insufficient to capture enough light. 
Wow. That is an incredible document. Also incredibly long (over 600 pp). 
My very first reaction was “heck, they were so busy doing science that they certainly didn’t have time to take pretty pictures”.
Interestingly, from Table 4-11, Apollo 16 carried three cameras, all with interchangeable lens. A Hasselblad EL, a Nikon 35mm, and a DAC.
In Chapter 31, they talked about taking photos of the Gum Nebula from the command module: “because of the bright Milky Way background, clear observation of detailed features of the Gum Nebula is very difficult.” They used the Nikon camera with a 55mm lens at f/1.2, with exposures ranging from 1 to 4 minutes. Used various filters to try and isolate the nebula.
With this scanned copy of the document, any stars in any photos were indistinguishable from the dust on my monitor.
At any rate, thank you Dr. Strangelove for sharing this.
And because I just can’t resist:
Sure, I was assuming a lens hood would be fitted.
No one would believe a photo of the Milky Way taken from the moon: no glow on the horizon from city lights (or is it supposed to be just after sundown?), no tree silhouettes to outline the portrait, and, most importantly, no gear strewn about the foreground to indicate that this is just a snap and not a staged (Photoshopped?) photograph.
The excellent One Big Monkey site discusses Apollo star photography in depth. It’s inspired by addressing moon hoaxers, so the language is a little fruity.
Thanks for the link. It is a treasure trove of photos.
This was an interesting quote:
I had always imagined that when the astronauts looked up at the sky from the moon, the Milky Way would have been a magnificent sight and so compelling that they’d surely have taken a picture of it. My imagination was wrong.
As an aside regarding hoaxes, and as this presidential campaign has demonstrated yet again, people believe what they want to believe; factual evidence is irrelevant.
Yes, a lot of people forget that they landed on the moon during the daytime. which is not really the optimal time to go stargazing.
Of course.
But without atmosphere, my understanding was that anywhere in heavy shade would be essentially darkness. Especially if the side of the earth facing the near side of the moon was in darkness at the time (i.e. – no reflection from the earth).
From Apollo Chronicles