Why there are no stars in photos taken by astronauts on the Moon: the mystery is finally solved

How many times have you looked at photos of astronauts on the Moon without seeing any stars? Have you ever noticed their absence in the background? Yes, indeed, most Apollo missions returned from the lunar surface without any images of stars. This was partly due to the fact that all the astronauts landed during a lunar day, when it was too bright to see the stars without special equipment.

However, with the help of optical tools, you can see the stars from the lunar surface. They look a little less blurry than from Earth, where our atmosphere distorts the light, writes Ifl Science.

American astronaut Neil Armstrong admitted that he had never seen a star from the surface of the Moon or on the daylight side of the Moon with his eyes without looking through optics.

You can't see the stars in the photos simply because the Apollo astronauts were primarily concerned with photographing the lunar surface and themselves on it. Thus, they used fast shutter speeds and small apertures to capture the brightly lit surface and the astronauts themselves. The result is that no stars are visible in the background, just as they would not be visible in your photos from Earth.

The only exception is Apollo 16 - the astronauts were able to capture stars because they used a camera with a built-in Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph.

According to NASA spokesperson Tricia Talbert, this first lunar telescope was used to take pictures of the stars (and the Earth) from the lunar surface:

"The Moon-based telescope studied a variety of star clusters as well as nebulae – clouds of gas and dust where new stars will be born. It is called a "Camera/Spectrograph" because it had two modes of operating: "direct images," which are pictures as from a regular camera, and "spectrograph" which is a way of splitting light to look for the fingerprints of atoms and molecules in astronomical objects," she explained.

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