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We must build the ELT if only so we finally have a ground telescope that can resolve the lunar landing sites, lol (it would only be a few pixels but still that
by ck2 3y ago
We must build the ELT if only so we finally have a ground telescope that can resolve the lunar landing sites, lol
(it would only be a few pixels but still that's insanely harder than you'd think, no previous other telescope, no gigapixel image can resolve it otherwise)
- bhaak 3y agoWe already pretty good images of some landing sites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_evidence_for_Apollo_Moon_landings#Ground-based_telescopes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_evidence_for_Apoll...
- Sharlin 3y agoOnly from lunar orbit.
- falserum 3y agoI’ve read somewhere that to see flag sized objects we would need telescope size of entire earth. Not true?
- alfiopuglisi 3y agoNot true, but you still need a pretty big one. In order to resolve a 50cm object 238k miles away (average Moon distance) at visible light wavelengths you need a telescope with a diameter of 500 meters. In order to resolve some details on such object, say have 10 distinct pixels on it, you need 10 times as much. Since resolving power only depends on the distance between the two extreme viewpoints, you could get away with two separate telescopes separated by 5km. But optical interferometry is extremely hard and, to this day, not very successfull.
- sapiogram 3y agoWonderful comment, thank you!
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoYou are ignoring the effects of the atmosphere, which are pretty extreme. For looking through your average backyard telescope (no fancy laser-measured corrections for atmospheric turbulence) you are limited to around 400x. You would need several orders of magnitude more magnification for 50cm objects 238k miles away.