Excellent reply to an HB at Quora - minus photos

[Kiwi]

C Stuart Hardwick
Has a lunar adventure in the March 2019 Analog Scifi. Updated 5y

What did you think of the USA Today front page showing two photos of the Apollo 11 flag waving and no stars?

What did I think of the USA today front page showing two photos of the Apollo 11 flag waving and no stars?

I think anyone with any intelligence understands that when you hang a nylon flag from a metal supporting rod in lunar gravity in a vacuum and adjust the exposure of the camera for bright sunlight, it looks just like this:

I think that anyone with any intelligence knows that when you reproduce such an image on the cover of the newspaper, you lose a lot of definition and contrast.

I think anyone with any intelligence, before making pronouncements or comments about one of history’s greatest and best-documented achievements, would seek to check out the reasonableness of their off-the-cuff impressions, say, by searching Quora for one of my dozens of answers to this topic.

I think that anyone with any intelligence should know at this point that the Apollo missions landed early in the Lunar morning, and the sky appears dark only because the moon has no air to catch passing photons of sunlight and scatter them down into the camera (or eye) of an observer—but that the photons are still there, illuminating whatever they touch with greater energy than the force of the hottest high noon sun back on Earth.

Further, I think that any intelligent person knows that stars are extraordinarily faint compared to sunlight, that photographs of stars made at night require long exposures and/or fast film and wide apertures, and that any photo made of an astronaut in a white spacesuit in broad daylight adjusted to show stars would look something roughly like this:

And I suspect that a really clever person will guess that the above image, though produced using GIMP and displaying numerous gleaming bits of dust caught in the equipment when this was scanned from the film, still looks starless when shrunk down by Quora’s image processor.

I think that any intelligent person understands that all this is why you can’t see any stars in this image (from The Atlantic) ..

…and why this overexposure of a dude on a hill with a headlamp looks surreal…

..and why here, the dim red light used to preserve the dark adaptation of astronomers working inside becomes a beacon across the landscape in this long exposure designed to capture the Milky Way…

..and why you can’t see any stars in this shot of the Las Vegan strip:

I think that intelligent people understand perfectly well why you cannot, and should not expect to, see stars in photographs taken on the moon or of other brightly lit objects against a dark sky.

I think people have a choice to make. Do you want to be counted in the camp of intelligent people, or in the camp of those who don’t understand elementary principles of photography that any child should know, yet presume to question the best and the brightest minds our species has to offer?

I get these in my email and can never find a link. Perhaps links are for members only. Some of the answers don't interest me, but occasionally there's a real gem, like this one.