this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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Did you know that you can take a telescope and LOOK AT THE LANDING SITES ON THE MOON?
If you can afford the simple equipment necessary, you can literally send and receive a ping to a device left at one of the landing sites that proves without a doubt we have been there.
I'm not a radio engineer, but my understanding is you're just bouncing signals off the moon itself, there isn't a device that echos the signal back or anything. There are mirrors on the moon to reflect lasers back though.
They left a couple retro reflectors on the moon during the moon landings so we can bounce lasers off them to accurately measure the distance to the moon.
I think that’s what they meant, cuz a ping to a radio device wouldn’t prove much, just that you are getting signals from up there. A laser would prove definitively.
Couldn't such device be delivered without people, like a remotely controlled rover? How does that prove that people made an actual landing on the Moon?
Because there’s like 6 of em, and we know exactly which mission launched each one.
You are correct, it proves nothing. None of these things prove that people have been on the moon. Unless you want it to. Then anything is proof 😅
Yea shure you guys think that nasa was able to land something on the moon with either remote control or fully automated and then after a sucessfull landing of a unmanned craft deploy a mirror angled so you can bounce back laser but you also say that PEOPLE were never up there? What is even needed as proof for you people?
You'd need either the biggest space telescope ever that doesn't yet exist, or a lunar orbiter. The latter is how other space agencies have taken pictures of the landing sites.
Now I'm curious, what's the resolution (like in meters) of a good home pro telescope watching the moon at say the best of times?
I'm no astronomer or astrophotographer, but this picture of the moon clocks in at around 320 meter angular resolution. That being said, a lot of post-processing goes into a shot like that, so some detail may be lost due to that. The atmosphere of the Earth is pretty difficult to deal with as its disturbances cause fuzziness and shimmering. Stacking multiple frames can help, but it's still never perfect. Earth based telescopes sometimes shoot a laser up along their line of sight to get an idea of how the atmosphere is messing with them.
For comparison, The Hubble space telescope gets around 90 m angular resolution for objects at the distance of the Moon.
Thanks! So waay too big to see a moon lander.
Isn't this because Hubble is actually made to look deep into space and not under its nose? I'm sorry, but I'm not watching a 14 minutes video for that.
don't trust everything on the internet.
They're right on this one. This picture here is pretty illuminating about the sizes of the views that Hubble captures:
Image source with additional reading. Zooming into an object a couple of meters in size on the surface of the Moon is in a completely different ballpark.
I did a two minute internet search and every result says that the Hubble doesn't have the angular resolution for this. It could resolve a football field on the moon, but not anything smaller.
It was made to look at nebulae and galaxies, and those are a lot bigger, even in apparent size.
Focal distance doesn't matter when the aperture is so infinitesimally small compared to the distances. All space telescopes are focused to infinity no matter what they're observing up there.