Why do photos of space taken from space never show any stars?

1 Answer
Mar 2, 2016

Brightness

Explanation:

Usually, when taking photos of anything in space, the object of your photo is lighted OR produces light directly. Against an almost totally black background, in order to capture said background we would need to take in too much light, so our main subject would probably be washed out, if it didn't give off so much light that we would have a useless picture. Therefore we take that photos of these subjects either with a fast shutter or with a high aperture to diminish the light. This makes it impossible to capture the subject AND the stars.

Just as an experiment, try taking a picture of the full moon next time you see it and see how you have to play with the camera just to get a picture that has any detail on it OR isn't very dark.