I was gonna prove to my co-worker we did in fact land on the moon, but Looking up how to see the landing sites with a telescope said it is physically impossible (improbable). An explanation went with it but… Yeah… It’s why I’m here.
I know we have a lunar satellite that can show it, but I’m prepaid for inevitable ” computer graphics recording”
Edit. Maybe I’ll just ask for someone to explain “Dawes limit”
In: Physics
Hi 🙂
> telescope
You can’t because the moon is really, really far away.
In models, the moon’s always this big ball orbiting our big ball. But it’s more like a tiny pebble that’s really, really far away.
(To get a sense of how far and small the moon is, check out [If the moon were only one pixel](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)).
To see details and the remains of the landing site, you’ll have to magnify several thousand times, and need a telescope aperture almost half a mile wide to resolve it as a dot. Regular telescopes can not resolve that amount of detail.
For something 0.5mm / 1.6ft wide filling the view in your telescope’s eyepiece, you’d need over 700,000,000x magnification and several miles of aperture. Our earth’s atmosphere usually limits you to around 200x magnification. A bit more on a good day, a bit less on a bad day. Even when atmopsheric seeing is excellent, you may only go up to 400x, 500x.
Even Hubble can not resolve details on the moon due to the required aperture.
Older post of mine with some explanations, math: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/otj55t/eli5_which_sizetype_of_telescope_could_ideally/h6vscmo?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
The reason why we can resolve planets, clusters, nebulae and galaxies is that they are really, really huge. Even though they are far away, you can see them in lower magnifications. The apparent size of the Andromeda Galaxy is way larger than our moon. But it’s much fainter. So without a telescope, you can only see it from very dark places.
The only way you can prove we’ve been up there, are the mirrors left behind by the astronauts. You shoot a laser and measure the time the signal requires to get back. But you need a very powerful laser, and a very sensitive receiver.
> prove to my co-worker
If recordings, astronauts and literature can’t, you will probably not be able to. It’s sad that people will rather believe the flawed arguments on social-media. Often you just solidify their believes if you try to argument. Going from debunking one theory to the next, with no end in sight.
Even if you had a telescope to show it, some weirdo on the internet will come up with some theory why it’s just a hologram or something.
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