Dear All,

There has been much speculation over whether or not the astronauts could see and/or photograph stars.

The lens effect proposed by Asimov is not true, since a star is a point source, not an extended one. It is well known that the higher one goes, the more impressive the view of the stars becomes. I certainly had a tremendous view of them outside the Lick Observatory in California. Hence, large optical telescopes are built at high elevation, where there is less atmosphere above the site.

The stars are still there even in broad daylight. So why do we not see them? Well, the answer is that we both see them and do not see them, depending upon our definition of the concept of seeing.

EMR incident upon the retina causes a chemical reaction over a particular integration time. This chemical reaction is converted into electrical impulses which travel along the optic nerve to the brain, where interpretation takes place. Therefore, is the act of 'seeing' the chemical reaction, or the interpretation?

The difference is this: light from the stars is still falling upon the photoreceptors in the retina in broad daylight and causing some chemical reaction. Hence, with this definition the stars are being 'seen'. However, other EMR is reaching the same photoreceptors, but is much more bright, such that the chemical reaction caused by this secondary light source completely swamps that of the star. The brain then gets the majority vote, as it were, and does not register any stars.

On the Moon or in space, when looking directly at the stars, rather than at the surface of some object, the stars would have nothing to swamp their signal and would therefore register in the brain, or on the photographic film or CCD. They would thus be 'seen' under either definition. Not too bright, with the exposure times used, but still visible. Furthermore, some of the shots on the Moon would definitely have been overexposed, since the astronauts had no light meter, either internal nor external, and thus had to guess the right exposure setting (a very hit-and-miss technique); these would show stars clearly and could thus have been used by NASA to answer this specific long-running criticism.

The eye very quickly adapts, although full dark adaptation does take some seconds. This is easily verified by walking outside from a bright room on a clear night. The stars can be seen straight away, and fainter stars slowly become visible as the eye continues to adapt. You can also look up and see the stars in the presence of street lighting.

With a very fine photographic emulsion, as was seemingly used with the NASA Space Shuttle photographs under consideration, there should most definitely be some stars visible in the black regions of the photograph.

The problem for NASA, as I see it (no pun), is that, having hoaxed the Apollo missions and claimed that stars were invisible, they were then stuck with this explanation for all time, including quite routine high-altitude/LEO stuff with the Space Shuttle. For them to change their story now, means admitting the Moon hoax.

It will be interesting to see what the Chinese say, God willing, especially as they have already dispensed with the Great Wall of China visible from space myth (I and many others stated that this was not possible years and years ago, from basic diffraction theory).

Neville.

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