I’ll just address one issue here-the lack of stars in the pictures taken from space and on the moon. They don’t show up on the film for the simple reason that the film is not sensitive enough to record their faint light with the given exposure times. Yes, your eyes can see them, but your eyes are infinitely more light sensitive than even the best film, particularly film from 1969. You can demonstrate this yourself by taking a picture of the full moon on a starry night. The full moon is reflecting full sunlight back at the earth, so the exposure is essentially the same as if you were taking a picture at noon on earth. Using the “sunny 16” rule of thumb, the proper exposure (on an adjustable camera) is f16 (the lens opening) with the shutter speed being 1 divided by the ISO rating of the film (or digital camera setting), or as close as you can get to that. For example, using a setting of ISO 100, the proper exposure is f16 at 1/100 second. When taking a picture of the earth viewed from the moon, the same rule would apply as the “full earth” is reflecting the sun’s light back to the moon. Some adjustments might have to be made due to varying degrees of reflection by water, land, and clouds but this would be a good starting point.
When you look at the print, you will be surprised to see none of the stars that were so visible when you took the picture. This is because the exposure was set for the bright moon, and the shutter is not open long enough for the stars to register. For that, you’d have to open the shutter for several seconds. This will result in a very much overexposed moon, and the stars would be blurry because the earth will have moved in the time the shutter was open.
Finally, one would think that if the putative Evil Government wanted to fool the gullible citizens, and for some reason stars were visible in such pictures, the people in charge of faking the pictures would have put the stars in along with everything else they were faking.
Another complaint about the moon pictures is that the shadows don’t match one light source. For some reason this is considered evidence of faked shots and totally ignores the obvious answer that the astronauts set up artificial lighting just because the sole bright light source was too harsh for good pictures. Photographers do this all the time in the studio and even for outdoor shots-this is what “fill flash” is for.
