Have any of you ever?

[Skippy29]

Been able to get a moon shot that happens to show any evidence of human activity on the moon? Just curious because lately I've been seeing some highly magnified moon shots, really close. So I thought it might be possible with all the rover trails, junk left behind, etc.

[Nighthound]

Unfortunately even the largest telescopes are not capable of resolving images of objects that scale from roughly 240,000 miles distant. Many of the detailed craters you see are many miles across so seeing something the size of say a car would be impossible. Even under ideal atmospheric conditions there isn't enough magnification. A Lunar orbiter on the other hand would be very capable.

[chris.bailey]

A 5m object on the earth subtends an arc of 0.003 arcseconds. The very best earth based telescope using adaptive optics has a resolution of around 0.02 arcseconds so we are a factor of 10 and a bit out in sheer resolving power and that is putting aside all sorts of other factors like atmospherics.

[PM01]

You would need a telescope that has 10 times the resolving power. When we build that, all the pundits about the "moon hoaxes" will be silenced.

There are too many Mulder and Sculley wannabes.

[umbra]

There are too many Mulder and Sculley wannabes.

Actually...Mulder would the one that believes we landed on the moon and Sculley would try to debunk him ;).

[Anke]

No I'm no expert on such matters so consider this a space-nooby type of question but what if they just pointed Hubble at the moon?

[Nighthound]

The Hubble is a f/24 Ritchey-Chretien Cassegrain with a 2.4 meter diameter primary mirror and a 0.3 meter secondary. The focal length is 57.6 meters.

Those are some impressive numbers but the telescope was designed for long distance/exposure work void of Earth's atmospheric influence.

The limitations of the Hubble lies in image resolution just as with Earth bound telescopes. The Hubble's orbit above our atmosphere gives it an advantage but it doesn't factor in when it comes to resolving objects smaller than 100 meters across at a distance greater than 200,000 miles.

Here's a sample of Hubble's capability:
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/hubble_moon.html

[chris.bailey]

Yes contrary to what you may instinctively feel Hubble has no better resolving capability than many earth anchored scopes and as it is not much closer to the moon it still cant 'see' anthing much smaller than 100m across.

[Fut]

Straight from wiki


Large telescopes and the Moon hoax

Another component of the moon hoax theory is based on the argument that professional observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope) should be able to take pictures of the lunar landing sites. The argument runs that if telescopes can "see to the edge of the universe" then they ought to be able to take pictures of the lunar landing sites. This implies that the world's major observatories (as well as the Hubble Program) are complicit in the moon landing hoax by refusing to take pictures of the landing sites.
A telescope's angular resolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution) (ignoring the muddying effects of Earth's atmosphere) is limited by the diffraction of light in the optics. This diffraction limit depends linearly on the telescope's aperture so that at visible wavelengths the resolution is about 14.1/D arcseconds where D is the aperture of the telescope in centimeters. For the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in low Earth orbit whose mirror is 2.4 metres (7.9 ft) across, the diffraction limited angular resolution is about 0.059 arcseconds which corresponds to about 110 metres (360 ft) at the distance of the Moon. In order to resolve an object 1 meter across into a single fuzzy spot would require a telescope 110 times larger than the HST, or about 250 metres (820 ft) across. But to resolve such an object with enough detail to recognize what the object is would require perhaps 100 times more resolution still, or a telescope whose aperture is some 25 kilometres (16 mi) across. Additionally, any ground-based telescope would have to mitigate against the effects of seeing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_seeing), beyond what is currently possible with adaptive optics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics).
Leaving aside the issue of maximum resolution, the Hubble Space Telescope was, in fact, used to image the surface of the moon in 1999. A gallery of the pictures that were taken can be seen here (http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1999/14/).

[PM01]

The large ground based telescopes with adaptive optics outresolve Hubble. Brute force aperture with quite a lot of correction from the AO systems.

[adam8080]

Maybe it is time to upgrade the Hubble? They should probably add 1080 video while they are at it.

[SimD]

Maybe it is time to upgrade the Hubble? They should probably add 1080 video while they are at it.

But then NASA would have to add a Blu-Ray writer on there and... oh wait this isn't Apple...

[PM01]

C'MON GUYS - LOWEST BIDDER!!!!

It's a gov op, remember? :)

[hollis_f]

Maybe it is time to upgrade the Hubble? They should probably add 1080 video while they are at it.
And a 'Direct Print' button - gotta have one of those.

[PM01]

So if they added all those, what would happen if they get the following...

"ERROR 99"

[adam8080]

And a 'Direct Print' button - gotta have one of those.

I don't know how easy it would be to get those prints back to earth. Or maybe a LONG usb cord :shock:

[adam8080]

So if they added all those, what would happen if they get the following...

"ERROR 99"

That would turn into an expensive trip to space to pull the batteries and put them back in.