Show us your setup and the final result!

waterrockets wrote in post #16703796
Not even close. To resolve the 3m rover on the surface would require at minimum a 75m telescope at this distance. That would only give you a dot though, but would contain no detail to identify it as the rover. So it would take a telescope on the order of 300m-400m diameter to render enough detail to identify it, and that would be from a telescope orbiting the Earth. To overcome the atmospheric distortion that plagues a ground-based telesope, you're probably going to need something like 500m-600m.

Since our current largest optical primary is 10m, we are talking about something with 3600x the surface area of our current state of the art. So we're a looong way from this kind of technology. I imagine it would cost an order of magnitude more than the surface area multiplier, so like 40,000x as much money to build such a telescope, compared to what it cost to build Keck. So, $140 million starting point for Keck would end up at $5.6 trillion or so O_o

Given the latest advances in Hubble instrumentation, image processing etc., what would the absolute theoretical limit for the smallest object visible on the Moon be?
Firstly we should say that a bright, high-contrast feature such as a star can be seen however small (in angular terms) it appears. In these cases the star would just appear as a dot. So, if there were a very shiny surface on the Moon that caught the Sun, it might be seen from Earth with quite a small telescope.

Here we will try to answer the related question of how close together two features can be and still be discerned as separate – this is called the angular resolution. The Rayleigh criterion gives the maximum (diffraction-limited) resolution, R, and is approximated for a telescope as
R = λ/D, where R is the angular resolution in radians and λ is the wavelength in metres. The telescope diameter, D, is also in metres.

In more convenient units we can write this as:
R (in arcseconds) = 0.21 λ/D, where λ is now the wavelength in micrometres and D is the size of the telescope in metres.

So for Hubble this is:
R = 0.21 ｘ 0.500/2.4 = 0.043 arcseconds (for optical wavelengths, 500 nm) or
R = 0.21 ｘ0.300/2.4 = 0.026 arcseconds (for ultraviolet light, 300 nm).

Note that the resolution gets better at shorter wavelengths, so we will use the second of these numbers from now on.

Hubble’s optics are now essentially perfect, and the telescope is above the Earth’s atmosphere, so this gives an accurate value for the resolution of the image produced by the telescope before it is captured by one of the telescope’s detectors. However, the detectors have pixels that are quite large relative to these values in most cases and this degrades the resolution somewhat. The pixels of Hubble’s latest UV-sensitive instrument, the UVIS channel of the Wide Field Camera 3 are 0.04 arcseconds across. This means that the final effective resolution of telescope and detector can be estimated as:
R = √(telescope optical resolution2 + pixel size2)

so for Hubble with WFC3/UVIS, and in the UV (300 nm) we get
R = √(0.0262 + 0.0402) = 0.048 arcseconds

Then, in an extreme case, such as the Moon, where there is lots of light (a high signal/noise ratio), it’s possible to do image processing (image restoration) and retrieve roughly a factor of two better resolution at the expense of some artefacts. So for Hubble, we conclude that the best resolution we are likely to manage is about 0.024 arcseconds (in the ultraviolet). On the Moon, at its closest distance to the Earth, this would give a linear resolution of:
363 000 000 ｘ R /206 000 = 43 metres

So the minimum separation of two objects on the Moon that could be seen as separate when observed by Hubble in the ultraviolet should be about 40 metres. Unfortunately it is very difficult for Hubble to observe the Moon — because the telescope is rapidly orbiting the Earth the Moon appears to swing backwards and forwards in the sky very rapidly and it is almost impossible for the telescope to compensate — so it is unlikely that this limit could ever be approached.

toolman21 wrote in post #16704229
Sounds like chartering a trip there to see it would be a cheaper option.

toolman21 wrote in post #16704229
Sounds like chartering a trip there to see it would be a cheaper option.

waterrockets wrote in post #16704400
In!

Dannybegood wrote in post #16704498
Wasting your time, it never happened!!

Dannybegood wrote in post #16704498
Wasting your time, it never happened!!

JoseCanseco wrote in post #16704638
Exactly! Based on that Hubble FAQ, it sounds like someone is just trying to hide the fact that nobody's ever been on the moon. "No telescope in the universe can see the landing module pieces, so don't even bother looking. Trust us, it's definitely there, we swear!"

:p

Madweasel wrote in post #16705051
You're missing the fact that hi-resolution lunar orbiters have now imaged the Apollo landing stages and even the tracks left by the rovers. The final nail in the coffin of the conspiracy theorists? They'll always come up with something!

JakAHearts wrote in post #16705421
We landed on the moon!!!!

skilsaw wrote in post #16702350
This is proof that the moon is not made out of cheese. Or is it? Pictures look like Swiss cheese.

PaulTopol wrote in post #16705872
What camera did you use?

And what was your lighting setup??

I tried but my flash has no effect. Perhaps I should try during the day when there is more light?