Since you have spent time fixing the Hubble Space Telescope, can you tell us why, when you look at a picture taken from Earth orbit, you can't see any stars in the background of the pictures?

That is a very good question. The reason is, if you are in your living room at home and you look out the window, you do not see stars. That is because your eyes are not dark adapted. There is so much light pollution around you, in your living room, or in street lights, that this light over-powers the amount of light coming from the stars

If you were to take an ordinary camera and go outside and take pictures of the night sky, you would not see any stars in the night sky either. You need to get film which is an ASA about 1600 or a very fast film, a film that would react to a very little bit of light. Then you will see many more stars in the sky than you see from down here on Earth because you're not looking through the atmosphere. So it gets down to stars are very faint. If you use your average daylight kind of cameras and film, you would not catch the stars

And its also very true when looking out the window with your eyes. If you are in a very well lit spacecraft and you look out there, you will not see stars. You need to darken the spacecraft, dark adapt your eyes, and then you will see more stars than you see down here from Earth