I'm not saying there is NO reflected visible light from the nearer objects, Lloyd,* I'm pretty sure your theory is wrong. The moon is rather gray and white both to the naked eye from Earth and from spacecraft photos.
but it isn't very strong. When the Apollo crews photographed the moon from orbit,
they used an ASA 6000 film, and it still doesn't look very bright. Why use such a
high speed film if you are looking at a bright object?
There are no exposure settings listed with the Apollo photos, but even the over-
exposed images haven't totally washed out the surface features. There are some
solar corona images too.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apoll ... azine/?124
So why does the Moon look so bright from Earth??
The Sun looks kind of weird though, but even then, the lunar surface is not
bright, and I would have thought everything else would have been either
washed out, or in total shadow.
These are images from MESSENGER, taken with the Wide Angle Camera. I think this is how the
Moon would look if it were not from something happening to the light in our atmosphere.
The Moon has a very low albedo, 0.12 max, and as low as 0.07.I presume this is taken with the panchromatic filter, but most of the mission web sites do not give a lot of information on how the images were taken, and they don't seem to want to give out much info on the technical details of the imaging systems.
Strange stuff, this thing we call light. I'm having fun though.
BTW, here is a site with lots of starry sky images. "This is something that
the average person could do, absolutely" he says.
http://www.astropics.com/index.html