Astronomy in Hawaii under threat?

[TomK]

There are more recent photographs taken on the dark side of the moon which show no stars in the sky..

Repeated reference to instances of stars verses no stars in a photograph without clarifying the details of each photo is as if to express a lack of understanding of the photographic process.

Photographs, whether they be taken by one of the telescopes on the mauna, a pinhole camera, or any of the myriad machines in-between, are constrained by a number of factors, all of which play a part in determining how much light is captured in the resulting image.

Stars, which when looked at from Earth, or our moon, are each very small amounts of light, especially when compared to the central subject of most photographs. As such they may or may not appear in any photo, not because they are, or are not, visible from the camera's perspective, but merely as a function of the light gathering properties of the camera/film/sensor settings.

As such, whether there are stars in a photo's sky, or not, is irrelevant to the point being made.

In other words, the photos the lunar astronauts took used an exposure time that was too short to see stars.