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Taking high quality photos of small objects far away is pretty difficult. See also how we can get crisp images of distant galaxies, but getting images of the e
by stetrain 4y ago
Taking high quality photos of small objects far away is pretty difficult.
See also how we can get crisp images of distant galaxies, but getting images of the equipment at the Apollo landing sites is elusive from anywhere farther away than lunar orbit.
I definitely wouldn’t assume we can immediately get detailed photos of a drone-sized object flying at high altitude.
- kurthr 4y agoI suppose, but it's not really that hard to resolve things at 30-60k feet. The big Chinese balloon was ~300ft across (and the equipment ~100ft) at 60kft would be almost half the size of the moon... 0.25deg or easily visible by eye. And you can get shots of that with a hand held mobile phone at night. Any amateur astronomical camera set up is capable of 1-4 arc sec (better than 0.0001deg) and daytime exposures would be <10msec. So it's pretty easy to get 1ft resolution at that altitude. Getting 1inch is harder, but doable especially with multiple images, which is possible now even for amateurs. If it was moving at 100mph (closer to 30-50) that's only <1ft during the exposure time (still 50x faster than the moon). The gov can do much better, but I wouldn't count on mm resolution.