Starship Asterisk*

BMAONE23 wrote:you might be able to do this image though if you were to use an occulting filter disk that would allow minute ammounts of light to filter through but block out the intense glare of our sun and still allow thw surrounding starlight to be processed unhindered.

Limiting light is going to be problematic here

If you look at the image, and the area of the sky of the image, there is only a dozen or so naked-eye visible stars in that area! The hundreds and hundreds of stars visible in that image would not even be visible (without telescopic aid) on a clear dark night without sunlight.

you might be able to do this image though if you were to use an occulting filter disk that would allow minute ammounts of light to filter through but block out the intense glare of our sun and still allow thw surrounding starlight to be processed unhindered.

Unfortunately, the real answer is nothing so artistically pleasing. To see the answer, just look at photographs taken during the Apollo missions where the sun is in the picture. You'll see a bright, blazing, white sun and a dark, black sky with no stars visible.

It's not that the stars aren't there or aren't visible. It's that neither your eye nor the camera has the ability to deal with both high and low light levels simultaneously. Your iris or the camera's aperture setting will have to be stopped down to be able to see the sun because of its brightness. At that level, not enough light reaches your eyes from the realatively faint and feeble stars, galaxies and nebulae. Conversely, if your eyes or the camera were adjusted to pick up the low light levels coming from the stars, then the sun is completely washed out.

Lack of an atmosphere will not cause the scene depicted here to be visible to the naked eye or even to a camera. The only way you can see both at the same time is in a "trick" camera composite like this one. If your eyes or your camera had that kind of dynamic range or selective sensititivity, only then could you see it or capture it in person in one view or one photograph.

stellarium has an option to turn atmosphere off.

I also wonder about this, I'm thinking there must be images of the sky from the ISS or something where the sun is visible?
How does the sky look like to astronauts there, or those who went to the moon?
If anyone knows of a high-resolution picture of the sky from up there, even without the sun, that'd be awesome. =)
Must see a whole lot of stars that aren't visible from the ground.

What does everyone else think the day would look like if you could turn off the atmosphere?
I think it would look more like the SOHO LASCO C3 image but whereas the SOHO LASCO C3 image is colored blue you would see gray fading to black. You would need to block the brightness of the Sun as you do when looking for Sun Dogs. You definitely wouldn’t be able to see the Sun itself without some kind of filter which would most likely blot out the other background stars.
What I find most intriguing about the idea is; I think you would be able to ‘see’ the solar wind. Isn’t the Corona the first part of the solar wind?

John R.