Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

160 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Some people claim that this still won’t work because actually
the Earth’s air absorbs starlight, making them fainter, so stars
should look brighter from the surface of the Moon. That’s not correct;
it’s a myth that air absorbs a lot of starlight. Actually, our
atmosphere is amazingly transparent to the light we see with our
eyes, and it lets almost all the visible light through. I chatted with
two-time Space Shuttle astronaut and professional astronomer Ron
Parise about this. I asked him if he sees more stars when he’s in
space, and he told me that he could barely see them at all. He had
to turn off all the lights inside the Shuttle to even glimpse the stars,
and even then the red lights from the control panels reflected in the
glass, making viewing the stars difficult. Being outside the Earth’s
atmosphere doesn’t make the stars appear any brighter at all.
The accusation made by the hoax-believers about stars in the
Apollo photographs at first may sound pretty damning, but in reality
it has a very simple explanation. If the believers had asked any
professional photographer or, better yet, any of the hundreds of
thousands of amateur astronomers in the world, they would have
received the explanation easily and simply. They also could easily
prove it for themselves with a camera.
I am frankly amazed that conspiracy theorists would put this
bit of silliness forward as evidence at all, let alone make it their
biggest point. In reality, it’s the easiest of their arguments to prove
wrong. Yet they still cling to it.
2. Surviving the Radiation of Space
In 1958 the United States launched a satellite named Explorer 1.
Among its many discoveries, it found that there was a zone of
intense radiation above the Earth, starting at about 600 kilometers
(375 miles) above the surface. University of Iowa physicist James
Van Allen was the first to correctly interpret this radiation: it was
composed of particles from the Sun’s solar wind trapped in the
Earth’s magnetic field. Like a bar magnet attracting iron filings, the
Earth’s magnetic field captures these energetic protons and electrons
from the Sun’s wind, keeping them confined to a doughnutshaped
series of belts ranging as high as 65,000 kilometers (40,000
miles) above the Earth. These zones of radiation were subsequently
named the Van Allen belts.