Telescoping Flag

Is the American flag and moon rover visible from Earth with a telescope?

So, we can look at Galaxies (Hubble deep space images) but not something as close as the moon rovers or flag. Give me a break.
Have you guys SEEN what our satellites can “resolve” from their distance?
………lies

Well we can do optics right here on earth. Your local optometrist would be able to do these calculations, nothing secret about them. Even our moon skeptic can check the logic of the underlying calculation. Consider that a 3 meter Toyota Corolla parked directly in front of you at 1 meter gives 3/1= 3 radians (LENGTH of 3 meters divided by DISTANCE of 1 meter) and should occupy 57.6*3 = 173 degrees of eyeball space. That’s just under half a complete circle. So if you sit cross legged at the midpoint of a 3 meter Corolla, with it parked 1 meter in front of you, looking straight ahead, all you see side-to-side is the Corolla, which of course is correct. The same formula establishes how “long” it appears on the moon (measured in thousandths of arc seconds, which means real, real, tiny as we would expect).

So now we’ve been introduced to the basic optical principle of calculating how big something should look at a distance. Now let’s re-do the calculation, and instead of putting the Corolla in front of us, we’ll put it on the moon. I’m going to use meters to simplify the calculations and keep everything in the same units. The Corolla is .003 kilometers long.

The average distance to the moon in kilometers is 370,000.

The arc subtended by the Corolla at that distance–how long it would look–is calculated in a unit called radians. Your thumb held up at arm’s distance is about 1/30th of a radian or roughly 2 degrees of arc. The Corolla on the moon is 8.1^-9 or 0.00000000081 of a radian. (I’m using 60 degrees to the radian rather than 57.6) Rounding, we’ll multiply times 60 to get the size in degrees, times sixty to get the size in minutes, and times sixty again to get the size in arc seconds.

We want arc seconds because that is the unit with which we measure the resolution of a telescope, which is its ability to see small. The Corolla on the moon subtends .0018 arc seconds.

My personal telescope, which costs around $10,000, has a lowest resolution limit–lowest ability to see small–of .35 arc seconds. The Corolla is 190 times smaller than the smallest thing I can see on the moon. And that would be if atmospheric conditions were perfect, which they never are. Usually my telescope works about four times worse than that.

One of the largest observatories in the world, roughly a billion dollar telescope, is the Keck telescope. It has a ten meter main mirror. The limiting resolution of a telescope is called DAWES LIMIT. The formula is 11.6/diameter of the mirror in centimeters. The Keck is 10 meters or forty feet in diameter which makes the mirror 789 times bigger than the mirror on my telescope. The Giant Magellan Telescope, schedule for completion in 2016, has a planned diameter of 25.6 meters.

Anyhow, the DAWES LIMIT of the Keck telescope is 11.6/1000 centimeters or .0116 arc seconds. But what we need to see my Corolla on the moon is 0.0018 arc seconds. We’re getting closer, but not close enough. The Corolla is 6.4 times smaller than the smallest thing the Keck Telescope can see. That sounds close. But put an ordinary book across your living room and try to read it. It may be only six times too small to read, but you’re not going to read it at all unless you have the resolution.

The Hubble has a 2.4 meter mirror and a resolution of .048 arc seconds. This is also insufficient to see the Corolla on the moon. The Corolla is .048/.0018 or about 27 times too small for the Hubble to see.

When the Giant Magellan Telescope is finished, it will have a resolution of 11.6/2500cm or .00464 arc seconds. The Corolla will STILL be three times to small for the telescope to see.

So what size telescope do we need?

We need to solve the equation 11.6/x=.0018 where x is the aperture of the scope in centimeters. Solving for x, 11.6/.0018=6444cm, or 64 meters. That’s about 2.5 times the size of the Magellan, which won’t be finished for years, and would be “one big mutha telescope.” No one knows how to build a telescope that big. Not yet anyhow. It would pose a major engineering problem to get it to point where you want it to.

That unbuilt 64 meter telescope will cost billions of dollars and have a lot of government sponsorship. Undoubtedly “they” won’t want us to “know the truth” and will be able to continue the giant conspiracy because there will, of course, be only one telescope on earth that can resolve a Corolla sized object on the moon. And it still won’t be able to resolve the American flag or the rover, because those are smaller than a Corolla. I *think* the lander is roughly Corolla sized. An object at the limit of a telescopes resolution, at the Dawes’ limit boundary, will not have any details. The lander would be a light colored dot or bump on the moon, one of the smallest things you can make out. With a 64 meter scope you would see only that and no details, ladders, or anything of that sort. If the sun is right you might see a light dot for the lander and a black dot for its shadow.

As for planets in other stellar systems, we have not “seen” them. We have inferred their existence from several sorts of sources. First, big planets make their stars wobble a bit. This uses a doppler measurement technique of light wavelength shifts not related to Dawes’ limit. The limit of this technique is about a 2-meter wobble, amazing given the distances. An earth-sized planet would cause a wobble of a few inches and so we cannot detect them. Sometimes planets pass in front of stars and cause them to dim by a very slight percentage. This requires very sensitive instruments as well.

Galaxies at the edge of the universe are still roughly 100 to 200 million light years in size which is a whole lot of meters. Basically the human mind cannot conceive how large a galaxy is although we can turn out the calculations well enough. And because we can do the calculations, it’s pretty clear, that a galaxy at the edge of the universe is MUCH easier to see, by several orders of magnitude, than a Corolla sized object on the moon. That’s just the way it is.

There is some hope that interferometric arrays of telescopes will allow us to detect objects that are beyond the limits of conventional telescopes. The Michigan Infrared Combiner has been used to photograph the surface of the star Altair and had a resolution equivalent to 270 meter telescope. This is technically very difficult work and I’m not aware of it having been used on the planets or the moon. If it could do that, that would be very nice to see in action!

In any case, regrettably, not me, not you, nor anyone we know, not even people who personally own very nice telescopes, are going to be able to look through a telescope and see a Corolla sized object at any time in the near future. What conclusions one might draw from this regarding the space program I don’t know, but what I can say, is that any discussions about what telescopes can or cannot do is subject to analysis by the same principles that optometrists use and is certainly not a government secret.

What you can do, is check the reasoning that I have put out here. I did. I took a magazine page and walked wayyyyy down the street one day and taped it up on a street sign. I had a small 4-inch telescope and a large 14-inch telescope and I examined the magazine page to see if I could make out individual words and letters. This experiment basically confirmed everything that the math above sets out, with one exception, the actual performance of the telescopes was worse than the math indicates. The reason is that the heat rising off the asphalt distorts the images and makes them shimmer and dance. But in any case–taking into account the size of the print, the distance, the size of the telescopes–it all worked out exactly as I describe it here for the lunar lander. It’s optics that you can confirm for yourself.

It is not generally known by Americans, but in 1972 and again in 1976 the Russian space program landed unmanned satellites on the moon which returned samples of the lunar surface. The Russians have been very uninhibited about listing their failed missions (just like we lost a few Mars probes). So the Russians have lunar samples returned by their robots and the Americans have lunar samples returned by their space program. If the Americans were lying, the lunar samples from the Americans would be different from the lunar samples returned by the Russian robots. In 1976 relations between the two countries were very poor, and the Russians would probably have indicated they thought the American space program was a fraud. The moon hoax theory depends not only on ignorance of optics, but also on ignorance of the history of space exploration. It glosses over the achievements of the Russian moon program and ignores the fact that several pounds of Russian lunar samples confirmed what the U.S. astronauts brought back.

People have often posted on yahoo groups that the Russians would have “busted” the U.S. because they have the radar and equipment to know if the landing was faked, but the problem is much deeper, there are independtly returned lunar samples and if the Russians had found the NASA samples to be fraudulent it would have been a very big deal.

Hope that helps,

GN

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