in what way do you think I did that?

The moon is not that reflective: on average it only reflects 12% of the sunlight that falls onto it. Still, that's 12% of 1360 W/m2, which means the surface still is four orders of magnitude brighter than the very dim stars.

IDK if the crew took photos of the stars. Just for fun, try taking photos of the stars tonight, under these circumstances:
1. you have to use a large DSLR.
2. you can't put it on a tripod, the only support you are allowed to use is the windows in your house.
Try keeping the camera still for the 10 seconds of exposure you need.

Voyager used a simpler method: pack all of the Pu-238 in close, and just radiate the excess power away.

The Voyagers transmit at 12 or 18 W. We receive those signals with the DSN, using dish antennas with a diameter of 34 or 70 meters. These days, the 70 m antennas are used most of the time.

For playback of the onboard tape recorder, all of the DSN antennas at one site are arrayed together so Voyager can transmit at 1400 bps instead of the usual 160.

Those are also used to send data to the Voyagers. For one of them, transmission is done at 20 kW. The other one had some failed component in its receiver, requiring more transmitter power: 100 kW.

Each system on the Voyagers can be switched on/off by the onboard computers.
There's no way to replace anything, but the main systems are redundant: There are 3 computer systems, with two main boards each. There are two radio transmitters, etc.

A repeater won't work, and is not the best way to solve the problem.

1. For the price of a repeater spacecraft, we can build several 70-meter antennas on Earth which are far more sensitive than any antenna we can put on a spacecraft.

2. The Voyagers are at 120 and 150 AU. For a repeater to be useful, it has to be somewhere in the middle between us and the Voyagers, so they would have to go to 60 AU. That takes 25 years.

3. The transmitters on Voyager have fixed power levels. They can be switched between 2 settings, and are using the lower power level (12 W) for most transmissions already. There's no way to reduce transmitter power below that.

I had a Macintosh LC II at the time, with a 80 Mb harddrive. I bought a Zip drive for it and suddenly I could a. back up all my data onto a single disk, and b. massively increase available storage, for a price that was a lot lower than buying an external SCSI harddrive. It was amazing.

The SCSI interface made a big difference: mine was a lot faster than the parallel interface ZIP drives I encountered.

Please! We prefer 'beleaguered'.

(shakes fist) Damn you, sans serif!

We kept our boss honest by pulling out the Bullshit Bingo cards at the start of every meeting.

We can't do that. The largest telescopes on Earth have a mirror diameter of 8 m, which gives a diffraction limit of something like 50 meters per pixel.
We have photos of the landing sites from lunar orbiters like LRO (50 cm/px) and Chandrayaan-2 (down to 25 cm/px).

Thank you.

So the idea is to use these in RTGs to replace the thermocouples used now?

Would it make sense to use them e.g. as the back face of solar panels, or as an extra layer on a spacecraft's radiators? Or is the power you can get from lower-grade heat sources too little to be worthwhile?

The USA and USSR have launched a few dozen spacecraft with RTGs, out of more than 12,000 satellites launched in total. That's not "many".

No. The N-1 suffered from these problems:
1. lack of testing on individual engines. The engines were not built to be restartable. They used e.g. pyrotechnics to open valves, meaning that valve could only be opened once. They tested NK-15 engines by building a batch of 6, testing 3, and if those tests were successful, putting the remaining 3 on the rocket.

2. lack of testing on individual stages. This was because the Soviets didn't want to spend years, $ and thousands of tons of concrete to build the huge test stands that would be needed for such tests. They did their stage tests by launching rockets.
They used the same strategy for Proton, which went into successful service after 14 test launches with lots of explosions.

3. lack of money. The USSR space budget was 1/20 of the Apollo budget.

4. lack of support from the leader of the Soviet space effort, Mishin. This meant N-1 development was not pushed, but allowed to languish.

5. lack of quality control. One launch failed due to welding slag entering an engine.

6. many engines on a stage, with no way to test the behavior of that engine cluster on the ground due to #2.

SpaceX has none of these problems. Yes, they've blown up a lot of rockets. 0 of those failures were in any way similar to the problems seen on N-1 launches. In contrary: those tests show SpaceX has designed Starship to operate reliably with 33 engines, demonstrating engine-out capability and resilience to violent engine failures.

Starship development is similar to N-1 development in the early use of launch tests. For Starship, this has not replaced stage testing on the ground. It just gives early access to a flight regime that cannot be tested on the ground: reentry.