Though it's correct that stars will have been absent from the lunar photographic images it is strange that none of the astronauts remarked on the stars in the sky.

Some of them did -- it's wrong to say that none did.

Do people ever think clearly about something, or, better still, do a suitable experiment before they argue about what can or cannot supposedly be done under certain circumstances?

To check this out, one clear, starry night I decided to try to create a standard "sunlit" scene I could stare at with my right eye, while keeping the left eye in darkness, then go outside and look at the stars with one pupil wide open and the other stopped down. I live under almost-black sky on the edge of a small rural village and only have to walk a few hundred metres to get really black sky.

The "sunlit scene" proved to be far easier to create than I thought. Using a photographic light meter I positioned a piece of ordinary A4 80 gsm white paper next to a 50 Hz 200 watt light bulb. Reading only the paper with the meter set on 125 ISO gave a read-out of 1/125th of a second at f16 -- the perfect "sunny 16" setting.

For the left eye, I put a thick, black woollen glove over my left hand and cupped it over the eye so that no light got to it but I could keep it open and blink so that tears would not obstruct the view of the stars.

After cupping the left eye for about five minutes in ordinary room light, I continued this for about another four minutes while staring at the paper close up with the right eye. This length of time ensured a near-maximum difference in the size of my pupils.

The next trick was to get outside to a dark area quickly, using red torchlight, and check out the stars with both eyes. The difference was so great that it was confusing and initially made me feel quite giddy.

With the left eye I could make out all the faint stars I usually see after five minutes of dark adaption, plus the two Magellanic Clouds and globular clusters Omega Centauri and 47 Tucanae.

The right eye was a real problem. At first I could only see about four of the brightest stars and didn't really have a clue exactly which was which. Among them were probably Alpha Centauri, Canopus and Alpha Crux. It took between three and four minutes for some of the dimmer stars to become visible and for me to start recognising constellations. Mike Collins wrote about the same thing happening to him in Columbia on the way to the moon. And it was around eight to ten minutes before the right-eye view matched the left.

This experiment convinced me that it would have been very difficult for Apollo astronauts on the moon to see all but the brightest stars, if any. They had the disadvantage of sunlight affecting their dark-adaption and therefore their view of the stars. I didn't.

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Don't criticize what you can't understand. — Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin'” (1963)
Some people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices and superstitions. — Edward R. Murrow (1908–65)