What do the stars look like in space?

[G'th]

Somethings thats been bugging me today is, well, what the heck do the stars look like while you're out in space? Outside of Hubble images, I've never seen a photo of the stars from say, LEO or some other location.

Granted, it may be that you can't see stars while near the Earth, but then again, I specifically remember seeing that the astronauts during Apollo commented on looking out at the stars.

But, no photos. In every other photo all you see is black.

Help?

[vger]

Same as we see on Earth, but without the twinkling.

[xcorps]

Some of the astronauts couldn't see any stars from the moon's surface. That's once of the core arguments of the "NASA faked the moon landing " nuts.

[problemecium]

I haven't been to space, but I have been to Hawaii, which has shockingly less light pollution than my hometown. And I could see like a billion stars per square degree of sky. So I'd imagine space is like that with slightly more stars, which is all the more reason to want to go there someday.

[Brotoro]

Stars won't twinkle in space. But to get a good view of them, you need to be in the dark (no bright lunar landscape, or Earth vistas, or lit up spaceship in your field of vision).

The extinction of starlight straight overhead is only a fraction of a magnitude, so you aren't going to see a whole lot more stars in space than you see from really dark sites on Earth. You can see maybe 6000 stars naked eye from Earth (if you are in an area that's dark enough...down to around 6th magnitude). Some people claim to be able to see 7th magnitude stars, and that would make about 20 thousand visible.

BUT... I expect that the visors of most space suits or the windows of most spaceships would absorb as much light as the Earth's atmosphere does, so I wouldn't expect the view to be that much better from space. You will be able to see more stars from a dark site in space though because on Earth, atmospheric extinction of starlight increases as you look further away from zenith, but you won't have that limiting effect in space.

[Nibb31]

The reason you don't see stars in most photos taken from space is because of photographic exposure. When you take a picture of a bright object (the Earth's horizon, the lunar surface, or another spacecraft), you set the exposure for the subject. This means that the backdrop (the dark sky) is underexposed and the stars disappear. If you

You can take pictures of the stars from space by setting the exposure on the dark sky. That's what telescopes do. But then, if you have another bright subject in the frame, it will be overexposed and the picture will be ruined. You would need to take HDR pictures to get both the stars and the bright subject.

Astronauts see the stars fine (on Apollo, they even used the stars for navigation) because the human eye adapts to what its seeing and the brain combines all that information together seemlessly.

Edited May 7, 2014 by Nibb31

[Dkmdlb]

Here is an approximation of what they look like.