Stars Can't Be Seen from Outer Space

originally posted by: GaryN
a reply to: wildespace
Yes, here are a couple that they took of the Sun, but never through an ND filter, which is what is needed to make it look as it should appear.

So now you accept that the Sun is visible in orbit in the direction away from Earth, thanks for doing at least that. The Sun indeed appears somewhat larger to the naked eye and camera sensor due to overflooding it with light, and an ND filter would show the actual circle of the Sun (being just 0.5 degrees across), but that is hardly the topic of this thread.

IMO, what makes the Sun visible is the Lunar dust atmosphere.

Keep in mind that the the lunar "atmosphere" is almost pure vacuum, any ionised gasses or dust around the Moon are extremely rarefied. They wouldn't have made the Sun as bight as seen in the photos and illuminate the lunar surface, the LM, and the astronaut's EVA suits so brightly. Ergo, the Sun's very bright light reaches the Moon and illuminates it without any help from the ionosphere/dustsphere (hehe, I just invented a new term there!)

And here are a couple of quick graphics showing the geometry of viewing from the Cupola.

What is the geometry when looking out of several of sideways-pointing windows of the ISS?



What about sideways-pointing cameras?

www.youtube.com...
www.youtube.com...
www.youtube.com...

a reply to: onebigmonkey

If GaryN has many cameras then I invite him to go out with a camera to the best place he can find to take photographs of the night sky and take some photographs.

Funny you should mention that. Last night I went out for a smoke about 11 PM, didn't have my glasses on, but the bright moon and a companion were staring at me, so thought I'd see what my camera would capture. I know it shoots the Moon just fine, but would it pick up Jupiter? Using my beat-up Coolpix 990, didn't clean the lens, no tripod, full auto, braced agains a deck post, bright lights on both sides of me reflecting of freshly pressure washed cement, elevation up at 75 degrees or so, and this is what I got. All the little specs are noise.

www3.telus.net...
www3.telus.net...

Garbage you might say, but look at the exposure time and consider the conditions.

DSCN5927.JPG
CAMERA : E990V1.1
METERING : MATRIX
MODE : P
SHUTTER : 1.00sec
APERTURE : F2.6
EXP +/- : 0.0
FOCAL LENGTH : f9.6mm(X1.0)
IMG ADJUST : AUTO
SENSITIVITY : AUTO
WHITEBAL : AUTO
SHARPNESS : AUTO
DATE : 2015.03.03 00:15
QUALITY : FULL FINE

DSCN5928.JPG
CAMERA : E990V1.1
METERING : MATRIX
MODE : P
SHUTTER : 1.00sec
APERTURE : F2.6
EXP +/- : 0.0
FOCAL LENGTH : f9.6mm(X1.0)
IMG ADJUST : AUTO
SENSITIVITY : AUTO
WHITEBAL : AUTO
SHARPNESS : AUTO
DATE : 2015.03.03 00:16
QUALITY : FULL FINE


And the Celestia view from the ISS, which of course they can't see because it means looking out into space, which they can't do from inside.
www3.telus.net...

No other stars were visible by eye, with my glasses on. I think if planets were visible from the Lunar surface, those guys should have been able to image them easily from the shaddow of the lander or from cislunar space with their better lenses, high speed films and long exposures.

@wildespace

What is the geometry when looking out of several of sideways-pointing windows of the ISS?

If the Earth is in view they are always looking through the atmosphere, there are no windows/portholes that can see clear space. All tose videos are looking through the atmosphere.

And I believe it is the lunar dust that makes the Sun visible. I have some images that I think help explains why, but no time just now, next time. But the appearance of the Sun from the lunar surface does not look anything like the images of the Sun seen in photos from the ISS, which is always that spiky blob as in the Sunita Williams image from a previous post. I haven't looked for any comments from the astronauts yet about the appearance of the Sun to their eyes, if it was as big as the camera saw it.

originally posted by: GaryN

Funny you should mention that. Last night I went out for a smoke about 11 PM, didn't have my glasses on, but the bright moon and a companion were staring at me, so thought I'd see what my camera would capture. I know it shoots the Moon just fine, but would it pick up Jupiter? Using my beat-up Coolpix 990, didn't clean the lens, no tripod, full auto, braced agains a deck post, bright lights on both sides of me reflecting of freshly pressure washed cement, elevation up at 75 degrees or so, and this is what I got. All the little specs are noise.

www3.telus.net...
www3.telus.net...

Garbage you might say, but look at the exposure time and consider the conditions.

DSCN5927.JPG
CAMERA : E990V1.1
METERING : MATRIX
MODE : P
SHUTTER : 1.00sec
APERTURE : F2.6
EXP +/- : 0.0
FOCAL LENGTH : f9.6mm(X1.0)
IMG ADJUST : AUTO
SENSITIVITY : AUTO
WHITEBAL : AUTO
SHARPNESS : AUTO
DATE : 2015.03.03 00:15
QUALITY : FULL FINE

DSCN5928.JPG
CAMERA : E990V1.1
METERING : MATRIX
MODE : P
SHUTTER : 1.00sec
APERTURE : F2.6
EXP +/- : 0.0
FOCAL LENGTH : f9.6mm(X1.0)
IMG ADJUST : AUTO
SENSITIVITY : AUTO
WHITEBAL : AUTO
SHARPNESS : AUTO
DATE : 2015.03.03 00:16
QUALITY : FULL FINE


And the Celestia view from the ISS, which of course they can't see because it means looking out into space, which they can't do from inside.
www3.telus.net...

No other stars were visible by eye, with my glasses on. I think if planets were visible from the Lunar surface, those guys should have been able to image them easily from the shaddow of the lander or from cislunar space with their better lenses, high speed films and long exposures.

Quite impressive, though your sensor seems to be reporting a lot of stars that aren't there as well as a few that are. Look at the effort you had to go to though for that image. Can you do that in a space suit? With the camera mounted on your chest? The moon and Jupiter look considerably bigger than they should. How do you account for that?

As you well know, because I've told you as have many others, Apollo 14 did capture Venus from the surface- it is well reported. They also captured stars and planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all to be found in Apollo photographs) from lunar orbit and cislunar space - I've shown you the pictures. Gemini took images of the moon from Earth orbit. Skylab took pictures of stars and comet Kohoutek. You know all this, you've been shown it many times in many threads.

@wildespace

If the Earth is in view they are always looking through the atmosphere, there are no windows/portholes that can see clear space. All tose videos are looking through the atmosphere.

How thick is the atmosphere? How many molecules do they look through?

And I believe it is the lunar dust that makes the Sun visible.

You are wrong.

edit on 3-3-2015 by onebigmonkey because: (no reason given)

a reply to: GaryN


Most of the Apollo shots weren't "high speed film." They were ASA(ISO) 160. That's pretty slow film, actually. Your shots are at ISO 400, 2.5 times as sensitive. You also had your aperture at f/2.6. When shooting in shadow, the standard setting for the Apollo Hasselblads was f/5.6. Your aperture was allowing 2.25 times as much light in. Finally, your exposure time was 1 second. Standard exposure time for Apollo was 1/250th of a second. So your exposure was 250 times longer. All together, your f/2.6 I,SO 400, 1 sec picture captured 1,406.25 times as much light as a typical f/5.6, ASA 160, 1/250 sec exposure.

originally posted by: nataylor
a reply to: GaryN


Most of the Apollo shots weren't "high speed film." They were ASA(ISO) 160. That's pretty slow film, actually. Your shots are at ISO 400, 2.5 times as sensitive. You also had your aperture at f/2.6. When shooting in shadow, the standard setting for the Apollo Hasselblads was f/5.6. Your aperture was allowing 2.25 times as much light in. Finally, your exposure time was 1 second. Standard exposure time for Apollo was 1/250th of a second. So your exposure was 250 times longer. All together, your f/2.6 I,SO 400, 1 sec picture captured 1,406.25 times as much light as a typical f/5.6, ASA 160, 1/250 sec exposure.

Thanks for giving a breakdown of the Apollo settings.

f/5.6 was for shooting in the LM shadow, by the way, and as they were primarily shooting in full sunlight, they used f/11. Along with ISO 160 and 1/250 exposure, these are very slow settings ("slow" is the photography term meaning it's only capable of successfully capturing bright light, and will struggle with darker scenes). For example, I think they inadvertantly used f/11 for this LM shadowed scene, and it came out very underexposed: www.hq.nasa.gov...



So, let's set your cameras to ISO 160, f/11 or /5.6, 1/250 exposure, and try taking photos at night time (to see if you can capture any stars or planets) and daytime (to see how your images compare to the sunlit Apollo images.

[Edit] Here are my daytime shots, using Canon 600D on manual setting. Since I can set ISO only either to 100 or 200, I used both. I guess ISO 160 would be somewhere in-between, but a little closer to 200.

ISO 100, f/11, 1/250


ISO 200, f/11, 1/250


ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/250


ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/250


As you can see, f/11 gives enough exposure for sunlit surfaces, but the shadows are dark. f/5.6 exposes shadows properly, but makes sunlit areas overexposed. Overall, these images look similar to the Apollo ones (if we don't count the softening effect of the atmosphere and backlighting from the blue sky), and blow the "light on the Moon is very dim" theory out of the water.

Interesting article with some great photos:

www.planetary.org...

originally posted by: onebigmonkey
Interesting article with some great photos:

www.planetary.org...

Without knowing more about the images it is not possible to say if those stars would be visible by eye, which is what we want to know. Which instrument, filter/s used, exposure time. Of course high-tech instruments can image stars, the OP is referring to naked eye visibility I believe.

originally posted by: GaryN

originally posted by: onebigmonkey
Interesting article with some great photos:

www.planetary.org...

Without knowing more about the images it is not possible to say if those stars would be visible by eye, which is what we want to know. Which instrument, filter/s used, exposure time. Of course high-tech instruments can image stars, the OP is referring to naked eye visibility I believe.

The problem is that you never point out exactly how the high-techiness of space cameras allows them to image stars that would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye. What's so magical about a CCD sensor in space, equipped with a filter wheel (including red, green, and blue filters) that allows them to see the invisible? How does Cassini spacecraft's CCD sensor with, say, green filter over it (which would incidentally block infrared and UV wavelengths), produces an image of stars, planets and moons if we can't see the same with our own eyes?

P.S. the information about those images can be found in the PDS archive: pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov... but suffice to say that a lot of such images are taken without any filters (or using clear filters).

a reply to: wildespace

How does Cassini spacecraft's CCD sensor with, say, green filter over it (which would incidentally block infrared and UV wavelengths), produces an image of stars, planets and moons if we can't see the same with our own eyes?

For one thing, the instruments can accumulate electrons (from photons) to build up an image over time, whereas your eyes need a certain number of photons/sec for visual consciousness to occur. If they are not using any filters then they are capturing photons from the full range of the sensor, in this case from UV to IR, which your eyes can not see no matter how dark adapted you were, so we need images only in the visible wavelengths, and with an exposure time that would be equivalent to that of what the sensitivity of the eye could detect. The only reasonable test is by using eyeballs to tell if the stars are visible, which means the Lunar surface or EVA astronauts, and when lookng into deep space and not through any type of atmosphere/ionosphere.
I believe this is why the big push is on to go to Mars, rather than return to the Moon. They especially do not want private missions to the Moon, or even to low Earth orbit it seems, as the lack of visibility of stars, or even the planets, could not be covered up. The Chinese with Chang'e are saying nothing, but there is no reason why the cameras on their units could not do some astrophotography which should easily show the stars during the night, and looking away from Earth.
The prism on the cover of Pink Floyds famous album is also a poke at NASA et al, as you will never see the Suns or Moons light being spread out by a prism in space, just another frivolous, time wasting experiment according to the brainwashed, but really, there is no excuse. Lets compare the spectrum at sea level and in low earth orbit, and again from cislunar space. Ain't gonna happen, can't be done.

originally posted by: GaryN
a reply to: wildespace

so we need images only in the visible wavelengths, and with an exposure time that would be equivalent to that of what the sensitivity of the eye could detect.

...which Cassini has done by using red, green, or blue filter, and relatively short exposure times (typically a fraction of a second, all the info is in the PDS archive). In fact, the dark-adapted eye is a lot more sensitive than a CCD, and starry astrophotos require long exposures (like you said, to accumulate the photons). A fully dark-adapted eye can see just a handful of photons per second.

The only reasonable test is by using eyeballs to tell if the stars are visible, which means the Lunar surface or EVA astronauts, and when lookng into deep space and not through any type of atmosphere/ionosphere.

"So there was a little space around the back side as I was going around it where I was shadowed from both the Earth and the Sun and that was pretty amazing. I could see more stars than I could possibly imagine. [...] In fact, there were so many stars I had some difficulty finding any of the 37 brighter stars that we used as navigation stars because they were so bathed in starlight from the other stars around them. " - Al Worden, Apollo 15 Commander. boingboing.net...

They especially do not want private missions to the Moon, or even to low Earth orbit it seems

Got anything to support your statement? Private spaceflight to Earth's orbit is all the rage now, and NASA are subcontracting private companies to deliver stuff to LEO.

Lets compare the spectrum at sea level and in low earth orbit, and again from cislunar space. Ain't gonna happen, can't be done.

Of course the spectrum at sea level will be somewhat different, due to the interference from the atmosphere.

The prism is like an extreme example of lens (or the lens' sloped sides are like prism sides), the optical principle is the same - refraction. If a prism in space couldn't deflect and split light like it does on earth, none of the optics involving lens in space would work.

Now for night-time photos using the Apollo settings. (I set ISO to 200 to give you a head start, as it were)

ISO 200, f/11, 1/250

Black as pitch. By the way, there's Sirius in that image.

Setting aperture to f/5.6 doesn't help either


Jupiter wasn't showing up with these settings either, so I increased settings to ISO 1600, f3.5 and 1/10 exposure to get it to show up as a relatively dim dot:


Granted, the sky is a little bit foggy here tonight, and under the very transparent skies Sirius and Jupiter might have just been visible, but I believe this shows very well why you or your camera wouldn't see stars on the Moon while being adapted / set to bright sunlit scenery.

originally posted by: GaryN
The only reasonable test is by using eyeballs to tell if the stars are visible, which means the Lunar surface or EVA astronauts, and when lookng into deep space and not through any type of atmosphere/ionosphere.

So all the quotes you've been given, and photographs, what about them? You've had numerous examples of both.

I believe this is why the big push is on to go to Mars, rather than return to the Moon.

There is no big push to go to Mars. There's a lot of talk and a few probes, but that's it. No-one has an active manned mission in the works, unless you count a TV show that won't happen.

They especially do not want private missions to the Moon, or even to low Earth orbit it seems, as the lack of visibility of stars, or even the planets, could not be covered up.

Nonsense. Have you never heard of the Google-X prize? This will happen soon. You've also had plenty of quotes from Astronauts, and photographs, concerning stars taken from LEO.

The Chinese with Chang'e are saying nothing, but there is no reason why the cameras on their units could not do some astrophotography which should easily show the stars during the night, and looking away from Earth.

And yet when I present you with numerous examples of lunar surface photos taken by Surveyor, somehow they don't count. The Chinese don't say much about anything, that's how they do business. All you can infer is that they haven't released any, not that there aren't any.

The prism on the cover of Pink Floyds famous album is also a poke at NASA et al, as you will never see the Suns or Moons light being spread out by a prism in space, just another frivolous, time wasting experiment according to the brainwashed, but really, there is no excuse. Lets compare the spectrum at sea level and in low earth orbit, and again from cislunar space. Ain't gonna happen, can't be done.

Absolute utter nonsense:

www.rollingstone.com...

Did the idea of the prism in some way relate to what you were hearing on the record directly?
No, it related mostly to a light show. They hadn’t really celebrated their light show. That was one thing. The other thing was the triangle. I think the triangle, which is a symbol of thought and ambition, was very much a subject of Roger’s lyrics. So the triangle was a very a useful – as we know, obviously – was a very useful icon to deploy and making it into the prism – you know, the prism belonged to the Floyd.

www.creativereview.co.uk...

For Thorgerson, the prism not only hinted at the visual experience of seeing one of Pink Floyd's light shows, but was itself a universal image; a magical trick of the light based firmly in reality, not fantasy.
"This prism refracted into a spectrum belongs to everybody," he writes in the forthcoming book, The Gathering Storm, completed at StormStudios shortly before his death.
"[It's] a quality of nature, but by rendering it as a graphic, against black, it turns into a design which seemed to fit the album to a tee. It is the black that does it."

As far as the light spectrum in space is concerned, you seem to forget all the UV imaging, and the mechanisms that allow us to work out how fast stars are moving away from us.

a reply to: wildespace

"So there was a little space around the back side as I was going around it where I was shadowed from both the Earth and the Sun and that was pretty amazing. I could see more stars than I could possibly imagine. [...] In fact, there were so many stars I had some difficulty finding any of the 37 brighter stars that we used as navigation stars because they were so bathed in starlight from the other stars around them. " - Al Worden, Apollo 15 Commander. boingboing.net...

Yes, he was looking through the optics, which incorporated a Star Tracker. The optics were very sensitive to stray and incidental light, and even in cislunar space the optics had to have the sun and earth well away from them for the stars to be seen.

Got anything to support your statement? Private spaceflight to Earth's orbit is all the rage now, and NASA are subcontracting private companies to deliver stuff to LEO.

The contracts are going to 'friends' of NASA, which are the corporate arms of the Military Industrial Complex. They don't like you, they blow up your vehicles, then talk about controlling who can perform launches in order to protect public safety. The Military will decide who can go into space.

but I believe this shows very well why you or your camera wouldn't see stars on the Moon while being adapted / set to bright sunlit scenery.

I fully agree with you that the stars were not visible using the exposure settings they did, but, as you rightly point out about the sensitivity of the human eye, Venus should have been very bright and intense to the photographer when the A14 image of the Earth was snapped. No lunar astronauts ever claimed to have seen the planets, which should be easily detectable by eye, even if not on film, without longer exposure.
And the bright sunlit surface is still not proven to me. The films they were using were only ever used previously by the Military, for "special purposes", and not available to the public. My calculations show, with those films being pushable by 3 stops (that's for the consumer version of the film), they could have used f/11 and 1/125 even if a light meter was calling for f/4 (cloudy day in Seattle) and produced good images with little background noise. Put a new camera such as yours on the Moon, on full auto, and lets see what the log file shows the camera having used. There are times when the Sun is low on the horizon that the lunar dust atmosphere creates a beam of brighter light on the surface, visible from orbit, or in those surface shots that look like a floodlight was being used, and NASA knows where and when to be to make use of that increased light level, and planned the landings accordingly. For most of the time though, light levels will be very low, requiring that military class film, and special processing, to get useable images. Even the vidicon based video cameras struggled with the low light levels, as is evidenced by the lousy results. Some of the new video and still cameras are extremely light sensitive, so lets see them in operation from the Moon, the A7S for example. Will it show the stars in real time as it does on Earth? You'll never know unless they try it, which they wont.
Had they used Kodachrome 25, 64, or 200, it would have been much better to determine absolute light levels. I used to use the 64 for just about everything, but I don't think it would have worked well on the Moon.

Of course the spectrum at sea level will be somewhat different, due to the interference from the atmosphere.

Most of my questions about the nature of light in space is based on what NASA has NOT shown us, not what they have shown us. There has never been a scintific, experiment based study of what is visible by eye from the ISS, or cislunar space, or the Lunar surface. We have a mish-mosh of opinions from the astronauts themselves, Armstrong with nothing visible, Mitchel with stars 10 times brighter, yet NASA never tried to explain the discrepancy. We are not allowed to ask the astronauts specific questions, NASA has to vet them before they are passed on to the astronauts. Without easy access to even low Earth orbit, the public can not perform the quick, simple and cheap experiments required to determine the visibility of our Sun, Moon, planets and stars, the Milky Way. We are left having to rely on NASAs word, and that is not good enough. The prism is an example of such a simple experiment. The spectrum should be different because of the effects of Earths atmosphere, but how different? Experiment. The experiment will fail IMO because when looking away from Earth, from orbit, there will be no Sun visible, or Moon, so you would not get a spectrum at all. That 200+ EVA astronauts have never said anything about seeing the Sun, Moon, stars or planets under KNOWN conditions is impossible for me to reconcile with what we are told about how things work in space, and the only solution is scientific experiments under rigorous conditions, and those who claim it is unneccessary to perform such experiments must be afraid of what those results might show, or be working with/for NASA/Military in order to prevent discloure of their long running, total sham. It is fraud pure and simple, and well deserving of a full scale criminal investigation.
Sure, let's wait for the so called private missions to set up on the Moon, and lets see what they report about the view, but I'll bet it does not match what we presently believe to be true. One company wants to melt ice they believe to be in the polar craters, but says they would need nuclear power to do so, even though at the poles the Sun is visible almost all the time, but there are no plans anywhere as far as I know to use solar concentrators, which on Earth are used to even melt metals to produce the most pure samples available. How they going to melt ore on the Moon? Nuclear power? What a joke.

Here's another nice quote from Al Worden from his autobiograhy 'Falling to Earth':

I curved around the moon where no sunlight or Earthshine could reach me. The moon was a deep solid circle of blackness and I could only tell where it began by where the stars cut off...I turned the cabin lights off. There was no end to the stars. I cou;d see tens perhaps hundreds of tims more stars than the clearest night on Earth. With no atmosphere to blur their light I could seem them all to the limits of my eyesight.

It's interesting that Al mentions looking through the optics in the quote given earlier, because what he means is looking through the sextant to see stars so that he could enter them in to the navigation computer.

Here's someone looking throught the sextant:



Hmm - it seems to be in the command module hull. Where does that lead to?

Here's a clue:



The outside!! That's right, the sexant, and the Alignment Optical Telescopes, where connected directly to outer space. The stars that Apollo astronauts navigated by were spotted using a sextant whose optics were not looking through a window, but actually gathering light from the stars outside the command module. In space.

Just for fun, here's a couple more stellar pictures taken by Apollo 15 I found today.

This one was taken during a contamination experiment to see how much waste dumps interfered with photography.



Here's the Stellarium view comfirming that at least some of those dots are stars.



The highlighted one, Menkent, was one of the ones used for stellar navigation (as detailed here www.hq.nasa.gov...). In order to have those stars listed as being visible outside Earth orbit, by the sextant mounted outside the command module, they had to know about them, so obviously stars outside Earth orbit were also visible on Earth.

This one was taken by the stellar mapping camera on Apollo 15 whilst flying through a cloud of ice particles. The exposure time is 1.5 seconds, and the long streaks are the particles. While not every dot on there is a star, several are (that was the point of the camera!).

originally posted by: GaryN

Yes, he was looking through the optics, which incorporated a Star Tracker. The optics were very sensitive to stray and incidental light, and even in cislunar space the optics had to have the sun and earth well away from them for the stars to be seen.

Nope, they could see stars and planets through the optics even with the lights on - I have the quotes on my website. The sextant and 'star tracker' (which isn't quite the fancy thing you seem to think it is) were entirely separate.

I fully agree with you that the stars were not visible using the exposure settings they did, but, as you rightly point out about the sensitivity of the human eye, Venus should have been very bright and intense to the photographer when the A14 image of the Earth was snapped. No lunar astronauts ever claimed to have seen the planets, which should be easily detectable by eye, even if not on film, without longer exposure.

When they were on the lunar surface they were in bright sunlight, on a bright lunar surface, and with a bright shiny Earth in the sky.

They saw plenty of planets, and photographed them, in lunar orbit and cislunar space where at least some of those things could be controlled.

And the bright sunlit surface is still not proven to me.

You have seen the moon right? You do know why it shines right? Try taking a photo of it and see how fast a shutter speed you need. Try looking at it through a telescope and see how much your eyes hurt.

The films they were using were only ever used previously by the Military, for "special purposes", and not available to the public.

Not true. Kodak developed the film specifically for NASA.

My calculations show, with those films being pushable by 3 stops (that's for the consumer version of the film), they could have used f/11 and 1/125 even if a light meter was calling for f/4 (cloudy day in Seattle) and produced good images with little background noise. Put a new camera such as yours on the Moon, on full auto, and lets see what the log file shows the camera having used.

If I ran the zoo...

There are times when the Sun is low on the horizon that the lunar dust atmosphere creates a beam of brighter light on the surface, visible from orbit, or in those surface shots that look like a floodlight was being used,

Examples please...

and NASA knows where and when to be to make use of that increased light level, and planned the landings accordingly. For most of the time though, light levels will be very low, requiring that military class film, and special processing, to get useable images. Even the vidicon based video cameras struggled with the low light levels, as is evidenced by the lousy results.

The planned the landings to get them there in lunar morning. Longer missions saw light levels change dramatically. You will notice looking at the Apollo images that they had adequate light levels.

Some of the new video and still cameras are extremely light sensitive, so lets see them in operation from the Moon, the A7S for example. Will it show the stars in real time as it does on Earth? You'll never know unless they try it, which they wont.

They aren't designing satellites and probes to keep you happy. Every gramme needs to be accounted for. There are plenty o decent quality photographs of the moon, why waste weight on a camera they don't need at the expense of an experiment that they want to carry out?

Had they used Kodachrome 25, 64, or 200, it would have been much better to determine absolute light levels. I used to use the 64 for just about everything, but I don't think it would have worked well on the Moon.

They didn't go there to take light meter readings.

Most of my questions about the nature of light in space is based on what NASA has NOT shown us, not what they have shown us. There has never been a scintific, experiment based study of what is visible by eye from the ISS, or cislunar space, or the Lunar surface.

There is no need to do it. It's a stupid experiment, it has no point. The photographs they have taken had a point to them.

We have a mish-mosh of opinions from the astronauts themselves, Armstrong with nothing visible, Mitchel with stars 10 times brighter, yet NASA never tried to explain the discrepancy.

How else are you supposed to get an idea of what can be seen by the human eye than ask astronauts? There is no discrepancy between what they say, just people who won't pay attention to what they have said and try and impose an entirely different agenda to it.

We are not allowed to ask the astronauts specific questions, NASA has to vet them before they are passed on to the astronauts.

Nonsense. It is very easy to get see astronauts and ask them questions. I've met several. No-one was there from NASA.

Without easy access to even low Earth orbit, the public can not perform the quick, simple and cheap experiments required to determine the visibility of our Sun, Moon, planets and stars, the Milky Way.

Yes they can. Balloons with cameras are increasingly popular experiments. Or you could just educate yourself and read the scientific evidence from the work that has been done and make up your own mind.

We are left having to rely on NASAs word, and that is not good enough.

Other space agencies are available.

The prism is an example of such a simple experiment. The spectrum should be different because of the effects of Earths atmosphere, but how different? Experiment. The experiment will fail IMO because when looking away from Earth, from orbit, there will be no Sun visible, or Moon, so you would not get a spectrum at all. That 200+ EVA astronauts have never said anything about seeing the Sun, Moon, stars or planets under KNOWN conditions is impossible for me to reconcile with what we are told about how things work in space, and the only solution is scientific experiments under rigorous conditions, and those who claim it is unneccessary to perform such experiments must be afraid of what those results might show, or be working with/for NASA/Military in order to prevent discloure of their long running, total sham. It is fraud pure and simple, and well deserving of a full scale criminal investigation.
Sure, let's wait for the so called private missions to set up on the Moon, and lets see what they report about the view, but I'll bet it does not match what we presently believe to be true. One company wants to melt ice they believe to be in the polar craters, but says they would need nuclear power to do so, even though at the poles the Sun is visible almost all the time, but there are no plans anywhere as far as I know to use solar concentrators, which on Earth are used to even melt metals to produce the most pure samples available. How they going to melt ore on the Moon? Nuclear power? What a joke.

Whatever view they present, however independent the research is, you will never accept it.

I think we can safely leave GaryN to his hypothesis, as no amount of evidence or reasoning will convince him. There will always be some hurdle (no matter how speculatory or erroneous) and the moving of goalposts with respect to our replies. For example:

The experiment will fail IMO because when looking away from Earth, from orbit, there will be no Sun visible

And this is after I had posted this image:


Over and out.

Indeed, and as a final bit of reading for Gary, here is some documentation showing how the Apollo Optics worked

www.spaceartifactsarchive.com...

web.mit.edu...

ia601206.us.archive.org...

From which he will hopefully glean the fact that there was no automated star tracking system on Apollo, it was done using the human eye looking through optics sticking directly out into space on the Command Module hull.

You can see stars in space.

originally posted by: onebigmonkey
Indeed, and as a final bit of reading for Gary, here is some documentation showing how the Apollo Optics worked

www.spaceartifactsarchive.com...

web.mit.edu...

ia601206.us.archive.org...

From which he will hopefully glean the fact that there was no automated star tracking system on Apollo, it was done using the human eye looking through optics sticking directly out into space on the Command Module hull.

You can see stars in space.

Yes, but... but... but... the super advanced technology in those optics turned the invisible self-focusing bullets of light visible, through the largely secret technology of wavefront sensors and diffraction gratings! You will not prevail!

originally posted by: onebigmonkey
Indeed, and as a final bit of reading for Gary, here is some documentation showing how the Apollo Optics worked

www.spaceartifactsarchive.com...

web.mit.edu...

ia601206.us.archive.org...

From which he will hopefully glean the fact that there was no automated star tracking system on Apollo, it was done using the human eye looking through optics sticking directly out into space on the Command Module
hull.

Maybe it's somehow romantic to belive that the astronauts themselves navigated to the Moon and back, but they had next to nothing to do with it. Here's the reality. They did check now and again, when asked by the computer, to verify the position of some of the stars in the Star Tracker catalog, 37 in all. The G&N computer would put the star up in the sextant, and if it wasn't dead center in the crosshairs, the astronaut would adjust the controls to put the star dead center, then push a button. This compenstaed for any drift in the Inertial Guidance system, but it seems the computer was pretty well right on most of the time. For the Star Tracker to be used, the computer always aimed the craft away from the Sun and Earth as it was very sensitive to stray light.

spaceref.com...

Ant from the document, this image shows the sextant/star tracker.
images.spaceref.com...

Images on this page are the best I can find of the unit, but it is obviously not just simple optics, it seems the star tracker data was integrated with the optics, but being a military device, the full details are not available.
Without the G&N computer and the computers and radar on the ground, the astronauts would have been lost in space, or crashed into the Moon.

You can see stars in space.

Yes, with the proper devices and under specific conditions. By eye, looking into deep space, no.

@Wildespace:

And this is after I had posted this image:

If you look at the EVA images you will find that they are all cleverly staged. That image is still being taken looking through Earths upper atmosphere, and there is enough conversion taking place to produce that spiky white blob. Why doesn't it look like the Sun seen from the Lunar surface? Where are the images of the Sun from cislunar space? Where are images of the stars from cislunar space? How about here?
www.lpi.usra.edu...

This video might be of interest here: www.youtube.com...
Space Station Live: Shooting the Moon


They mention that an ISS astronaut recently photographed the Moon from Node 2 zenith window (which looks directly away from Earth).

~~~

Then there's this 42-page debate with GaryN on Thunderbolts.info forum: www.thunderbolts.info...

I guess we didn't know what we were getting ourselves into by posting a few casual replies here and hoping they would have at least some effect.