Why Can We See Stars In The Sky Why is it when we look up into the night sky we can see stars. but when you see pictures taken from the ISS you don't see any stars. Why is this?
 A: The reason is that the exposure on the camera is set so that the main subject of the image is properly exposed, ie not too dim and not too bright.  Because the typical objects being photographed are quite bright, the image detector (camera) will not get enough light from the stars for them to show up.
A: There are plenty of pictures from the ISS in which you can see stars.

A: It's because of the short Dynamic range of the camera. The human eye has a very large dynamic range which allows it to see at the same time, lights of low exposure and lights of high exposure. The same problem exists when you try to capture a photo against the sun light. Either the sky is completely white and the object is correclty lightened, or the sky is correcly lightened and all the objects are dark unlike what you see with your eyes...
There is a topic in photography called High Dynamic Range (HDR) which consists of taking pictures of different exposure levels, and assembling them by computer (sometimes by the camera itself) in order to approach what we can see with the human eye.
HDR Image with stars
A: This is for the same reason that you don't see any stars on moonwalk pictures or videos; the reflected sunlight from Earth (or in my example, the moon) is so much brighter that it washes out the faint starlight.
