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
They’re too small to be visible with buildable telescope
A telescope is limited in how precisely it can capture detail. When you have a point light source it ends up kind of looking like a little blob, and if you put two close to each other they can appear to be a single blob rather than the two blobs. How close you can get them(in visual angle) depends on the diameter of the telescope and the wavelength you’re working with
The base of the lunar lander is only about 4 meters in diameter, the legs add another 5 but they’re going to be too skinny to help you here. 4 meters, at a distance of 400,000 km is 10^-8 radians which is really really tiny.
Your telescope has a resolution of ~1.22 * (wavelength)/(Diameter of telescope) so assuming green light (500nm) to even pick out a single spot 4 meters wide on the moon 400,000km away you need a telescope with a diameter of 61 meters. If you want it to be 2×2 pixels then you need 122 meters
This is a hard physics limitation due to the wave nature of light, and doesn’t include the atmosphere fuzzing up your results even more.
This is why we don’t just use satellite imagery of Earth. If you want good details you need to combine aerial imagery either through photography planes or unmanned drones. Being wayyy closer to the target lets them use far smaller lenses and capture better images.
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