Interesting because this is a photo taken from a spacecraft, and the exposure is good enough to show moons surface in earthlight, the brilliance of the sun peeping over the horizon, and note surprisingly    stars...    er well starry planets   dots of light..  No stars ...  I would have thought stars would have been brighter than the planets...None shining here. 

 

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The plane of the ecliptic is well seen in this picture from the 1994 lunar prospecting Clementine spacecraft. Clementine's camera reveals (from right to left) the Moon lit by Earthshine, the Sun's glare rising over the Moon's dark limb, and the planets Saturn, Mars and Mercury (the three dots at lower left).

The ecliptic is the apparent path that the Sun