I am not a professional photographer, but I do know that if you photograph the sky with ISO160 film at f11 & 1/250th you will not see stars. Kiwi has already quantified exactly why this is so on page 1 of this thread. This isn't a matter of professional credentials (or whom to believe, or what we've been told); it's a matter of the rock-solid fundamentals of your profession.
This is not meant to dis you. It is simply that most professional photographers I've met have made their living by photographing portraits, weddings, landscapes, models, sporting events (or other photojournalism), etc. However, unless they have tried their hand at astrophotography, they often don't understand just how difficult it is to capture a stellar image.
So you have found stars in processed negatives. Fine; but as you know, not all negatives are equal. What was the photo stock? ISO? What was the f-stop & shutter speed? How do you know that what you saw on the negatives were, in fact, stars? (These are rhetorical questions, by the way; meant to get you thinking about the
science involved, instead of "common sense" and "what it looks like to me".) Edited to add: Since I wrote this, you have clarified that you had an over-exposed image that had stars. If this is so, that exposure time HAD to have been several seconds or even minutes long (like Kiwi said, thousands or tens-of-thousands of times longer than daylight photography). If your "underexposed" companion had 1/10 of the exposure time (say, 3 seconds instead of 30 seconds - I'm assuming that if it was a nighttime image the aperture would have been wide-open at f1.4 to f2.8 with a high ISO) it could certainly have latent star images on it, but this is totally irrelevant to photographs at at f11 & 1/250th on ISO160.
It keeps coming back to that question: How do we establish whether or not what you are seeing are stars?
To assume however that they are most definitely, NOT Stars, well, this one has me at odds with what I know and believe. There are blues greens and reds and trails and irregular shapes. You really need to see for yourself.
I have looked at your processed image, and also three separate high-resolution scans of the relevant frames. The 2349x2379 pixel images at The Project Apollo Archive are heavily processed to make them prettier (which is why they're my favorite
). The
Apollo Image Atlas has 3900x3900 cropped-to-the-frame scans with much less processing. The
Gateway to Astronaut Photography of the Earth (which, despite its name also includes the Apollo Lunar images) has 4400x4600 uncropped scans that have had no processing other than the scan itself. In both of the latter scans, the resolution is high enough to see the film grain.
Interestingly, all of the scans show the same dots in the sky (plus a nice blue one I found in a black surface shadow in the foreground). This indicates the artifacts are probably on the original transparency. However...
I'm now curious as to the said 'artifacts' that are revealed in the black space.[/url]
You say that, but I've seen little attempt on your part to pursue this in detail. So far, you have only identified two possibilities:
1.) They are stars.
To me they look like Stars (Stars=Planets, Galaxies, Nebulae etc.)
I've been doing amateur astronomy and photography for 40+ years and I say they do not look like that.
You already pointed out in your original post that the positions of the artifacts are not consistent from frame to frame. Thus, your own evidence argues against the possibility. The science of your profession also definitively disallows what you claim. I do not understand why you persist in pursuing this.
2.) They are somehow - in some undefined way - evidence that the image is faked.
At the bottom of what I'm hoping to achieve is the possibility that not all images are REAL...
It has already been pointed out that faking photographs in this way makes no sense in any context.
Oh, and by the way,
WHY do you want to "achieve this possibility?
