I think the objection is that the stars are missing on ordinary
pictures shot using ordinary (super amazing military grade) film.
Again, not surprising. Take a picture of a (non-sun) star, with a small-lens camera (under 50 inch objective) and that star should appear as a point source of light, if the camera is well-focussed. Even then, the amount of light hitting that analog "pixel" is probably vastly lower than a camera aiming at a nearby surface illuminated by earth's Sun, as would be seen on the Moon by an astronaut taking a picture.
Oh, ok. So in principle the stars were underexposed to the point of not showing up on film.
Exactly correct.
On the other hand, if you point a camera at the sky, on the moon, during the lunar night, shouldn't you be able to get...something?
Suppose you take an old-style film camera, one without any sort of automatic exposure adjustments, to the bright, sunlit beach, and adjusted it to take good pictures with correct exposures. Then you wait 12 hours, and it is nighttime. You do not adjust your camera's settings. If you take a picture of the sky (except possibly for the Moon) you will see...nothing. But if you open up the aperture (a variable-diameter shutter designed to allow more, or less, area for light to come in and expose the film), and perhaps if you increased the shutter-speed from, say, 1/1000 second to maybe 10 seconds (and putting the camera on a tripod to ensure it doesn't move), THEN you will be able to photograph stars.
What about radar resolution? Is it possible to track a 5 x 5 x 5 m object from a distance of 350,000 kilometers?
That should be easy. And it would be far easier if built onto that object are some microwave-sized "corner cubes reflectors" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector , which have the peculiar property of sending radar (or light, etc) directly back in the direction from which it came. Optical corner-cubes are easy to find: They are on the backs of cars, and are used as visual retroreflectors on roads. They are much better than Scotchlite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflective_sheeting , which is made from tiny glass spheres. Jim Bell
http://petapixel.com/2015/05/26/film-vs-digital-a-comparison-of-the-advantag... "A release by Kodak showcased that most film has around 13 stops of dynamic range." That's a factor of about 8000. Jim Bell