Re: Telescope photos of the moon?

On Sun, 02 Jul 2006 02:25:22 -0700, Osiris88 wrote:


danstan wrote:
"Osiris88" <zz99z@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1151830554.790974.200890@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
We have powerful telescopes that can see astonishing detail. Let's
have some shots of the US flag standing on the moon and that should
put to rest the conspiracy theories that say we didn't go there.

Besides, it would make an awesome photo in its own right.

If they didn't believe the photo's that the astronauts brought back, and
the video, and all the men who landed there, and the whole of NASA.

Why would they believe "telescope" photo's?

That is a fair point, thanks. Some will never believe anything. But I
still think it would make an astounding photograph. I wonder why nobody
has done this.

Probably because the Moon, being 3.85 * 10^8 m away, would require a
telescope which could resolve details of 2.6 nanoradians or 540
microarcseconds (1 arc-second is 1/3600'th of a degree) just to see the
flag as a single pixel (assuming it's 1m in length). With adaptive optics
one might get 50 milliarcseconds:

http://www.keckobservatory.org/news/science/060110_lgs/index.html

Slashdot mentions an "Internet Telescope" that hones it down to 20
milliarcseconds:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/05/0120246

For its part the Hubble, when it's working, has a resolving power of 46
milliarcseconds, and its camera is out until someone can get up there and
fix it.

http://www.redzero.demon.co.uk/moonhoax/Hubble.htm

(The 10% discrepancy is easily explainable since I used 3.85 * 10^8m for
Earth-moon distance; he used 3.5 * 10^8m. Perigee is 3.63104*10^8m,
apogee 4.05696*10^8 m, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon .
This works out to a semimajor of 3.844 * 10^8 m.)

The good news: the LEM knocked the flag over with its thrust so we might
have a fighting chance of seeing Old Glory up there, if we can get a good
enough telescope. The bad news: I have no idea whether it was covered
with dust as the LEM knocked it over, or how convincing such a photo would
be; after all, there's that famous photo of a "face" on Mars. Nor is it
clear whether we can ever sufficiently eliminate atmospheric distortion.

--
#191, ewill3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
It's still legal to go .sigless.

.

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