If you ’ve ever taken a few arcminute out of your day to depend at previous footage and photograph of cosmonaut spring around on the Moon , you may notice a want of stars in the scope .
rent ’s get the obvious out of the way . It ’s not somebig conspiracywhere NASA decided to fake the whole thing , organise a mammoth cover up , but forget that " place has stars " when it come time to do the actual hoax . However , itistrue that most of the Apollo missions did not return any images of the wiz from the surface of the Moon .
Part of the grounds for this was that all cosmonaut have land during the lunar twenty-four hour period , when it is too bright to see the stars unaided .
Earth and the stars, captured from the Moon.Image credit: NASA
" We were never able to see stars from the lunar surface or on the Daylights Side of the Moon by eye without attend through the optics , " Neil Armstrong said in apress league , with Buzz Aldrin agreeing : " I do n’t remember seeing any . "
However , it is possible to see the star from the lunar surface using optical equipment , and they really seem a little less blurry than from Earth , where our standard atmosphere bow the lighting . So , why did n’t the stars show up in other photos ? That ’s really aphotography doubtfulness , not one about blank space .
Astronauts of the Apollo program were primarily interested with becharm image of the lunar Earth’s surface , and themselves standing upon it . As such , they used afast shutter speed and lowly aperturein ordination to catch the brightly - illumine surface and spaceman to get the guess . The final result is that no maven are seeable in the background , just as the virtuoso would not be visible in your own photos from Earth .
The only elision is Apollo 16 , which strike an tool named the Far Ultraviolet Camera / Spectrograph .
" The Moon - based scope studied a variety of star clusters as well as nebulae – clouds of gas and dust where newfangled stars will be endure , " NASA ’s Tricia Talbert explain in ablog post . " Astronauts also pointed it at the gravid Magellanic Cloud , which is a small coltsfoot orbiting the Milky Way . It is called a ' Camera / Spectrograph ' because it had two modes of operating : ' direct images , ' which are pictures as from a even camera , and ' spectrograph ' which is a way of split light to count for the fingerprint of atoms and molecules in galactic objects . "
Through this first Moon - based telescope , stars ( and the Earth ) were bewitch from the lunar airfoil .
While the first astronaut land on the Moon did not see the superstar too well , Michael Collins sit around alone in the command mental faculty and blow behind the drab side of the Moon . There , completely switch off off from communications with any other human , he at least had a outstanding view .
" I feel this strongly – not as veneration or lonesomeness – but as consciousness , anticipation , satisfaction , confidence , almost exultation . I like the feeling , " he wrote in his 1974 bookCarrying The Fire . " Outside my window I can see lead – and that is all . Where I know the Moon to be , there is simply a black nullity ; the Moon ’s presence is delimitate solely by the absence of stars . "
