Maybe they moved the vehicle in a better light for a better photograph.
But then why wouldn't they drive it to the spot?
Would the black background be starless?

You probably wouldn't see stars gay-belle, but I'm only guessing here, basing my assumption on normal aspects of photography, which is that the moon surface would be extremely bright from direct unfiltered sunlight illuminating everything, so the iris would be set to small (a high F8 no.) and the exposure time would be set to very fast, too fast to allow the relatively dim stars to effect the photographic emulsion. However, I am surprised that the astronauts say they couldn't see stars, I would have thought that it would have been a spectacular display. So, difficult to understand what is going on here.

The stars aren't bright enough to show up in the exposures they were using for the surface shots, much like any photos you take outside in low light or with a flash won't show stars either.
There are some shots from a later mission that were taken on long exposure looking up at the sky.
I am not aware of the astronauts saying they couldn't see stars. I would have thought they would unless the glare filters on their visors blocked them out.

The astronauts didn't often have to pick the rover up but it was planned for incase they got stuck somewhere.
I did see a transcript of a conversation of two astronauts moving the rover.
All the photos I have seen bar the one you posted have got tracks in them but then again I haven't seen them all.

I will post the photo's of the Rover (with no tracks to or from) as soon as I find them Hero42, there are a number of quite famous ones shown on many scoffers web sites. Genuine NASA photo's too, I have verified every one that has been displayed. There simply is no need to forge anything, the photo's speak for themselves.

Post deleted at 27 Jan 2010 12:04pm by GrownUps Administrator