Can you see where the Apollo moon landers are with a telescope from earth?
pauleel asked:
Apollo 13 - 18 left flags and the Lunar Lander bases and rovers. Can any of this be seen from earth with a telescope?
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Apollo 13 - 18 left flags and the Lunar Lander bases and rovers. Can any of this be seen from earth with a telescope?
March 2nd, 2009 at 12:20 am
No. The most powerful telescope we have (Hubble) has a resolution of one pixel per football field on the Moon. Which means a football field would be a dot. And a flag or lander, invisible.
March 3rd, 2009 at 9:29 pm
not really, i mean c’mon who would think they can?
March 6th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
Uh no, most of that stuff was probably destroyed after the wrap party and the studio was dismantled. Kubrick might have held on to some piece of memoribilia, or one of the prop guys might have picked up a ‘moon rock’ when they were sweeping up the set.
March 10th, 2009 at 4:05 am
No. 240,000 miles is just too far away to make out something that small, even with the largest telescopes in the world.
By the way, Hubble is not the largest or most powerful telescope in the world. Many telescopes on the ground are larger, but the distorting effects of the air usually prevent them from realizing their full resolving power. But with the new adaptive optics they can come close to their theoretical limits, and surpass Hubble, at least in special cases. But even that is not enough to see the Apollo hardware on the Moon.
March 10th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
First, Apollo 13 didn’t land, remember? Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 all left behind flags, scientific equipment, and of course, the descent stage of the Lunar Module. They cannot be seen from Earth. There was no Apollo 18. Congress, in it’s brilliant wisdom, scrapped missions 18-20.
March 11th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
No. You can see the general regions of the landers (like Mare Tranquilitas for Apollo 11), but the landers are very small. I think that the diameter of the landers was only about 5 meters. With a little number crunching, you’ll find that seeing something that small from 240,000 miles away is roughly as hard spotting a softball from 3000 miles away. That’s far too small to be resolved.
March 13th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
no, afraid not. it’s just far too much detail to focus on.