But, you might be saying, “how can this be? I thought the astronauts on the Moon couldn’t see any stars, so how can anyone see stars in space?”
It is a common misconception that the Apollo astronauts didn’t see any stars. While stars don’t show up in the pictures from the Apollo missions, that’s because the camera exposures were set to allow for good images of the bright sunlit lunar surface, which included astronauts in bright white space suits and shiny spacecraft. Apollo astronauts reported they could see the brighter stars if they stood in the shadow of the Lunar Module, and also they saw stars while orbiting the far side of the Moon. Al Worden from Apollo 15 has said the sky was “awash with stars” in the view from the far side of the Moon that was not in daylight.
Just like stargazers on Earth need dark skies to see stars, so too when you’re in space.[/i]
Michael Collins said he couldn't see any stars at all and he was supposedly orbiting the moon.
Are you sure about that?
Regarding going around the dark side of the moon with no radio contact for an hour:
“If a count were taken,” Collins famously wrote in his 1974 memoir Carrying the Fire, “the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side. I like the feeling. Outside my window I can see stars — and that is all. Where I know the moon to be, there is simply a black void.”
He said he couldn't remember seeing any at the Apollo 11 conference
This is what happens when some context is removed. Don’t watch some cherry-picked clip with someone else’s biased narrative all over it. Watch the actual source. As in here:
47:13
Questioner:
I have two brief questions I'd like to ask if I may when you were carrying out that incredible moonwalk did you find that the surface was equally firm anywhere or whether harder on softer spots that you could detect and secondly when you looked up at the sky could you actually see the stars and the silica River in spite of the glare?Skipping forward to the “stars” answer:
48:22
Armstrong:
….we were never able to see stars from the lunar surface or on the daylight side of the Moon without looking through the optics I don't recall during the period of time that we were photographing the SONA curl of what what stars we could see...Collins (Turning to Neil):
I don’t remember seeing any.Collins is adding on to Neil’s statement, as in, no, they couldn’t see any stars on the
daylight side of the moon. Just like we can’t see stars on the daylight side of earth. He wasn’t saying they never saw stars throughout the mission, just not in the “day time”. Which obviously makes sense. And context is everything.
And like I previously mentioned, Collins was pretty clear in his book that on the dark side of the moon it was “awash with stars”.
Not to mention that they used the stars for checking their navigation to and from the Moon:
14:16
Aldrin:
...we also made use of the Stars through the telescope and aligning a crosshair by rotating the field of view until the crosshair superimposed on the star this would give us the angular measurement of the star within the field of view of the telescope we then determine the distance...So yeah, they saw stars, when it was dark enough to do so.