I recently saw a photo somebody posted of a galaxy 50 million light years away. I have always wondered, why doesn’t he point it at the moon or even a planet 10 light years away and see the surface up close? We might see water or certain organisms. I have yet to see a picture like that in my lifetime. Thanks in advance for the answer.
In: Other
You have two different claimes
> **solar system 50 million light years away**
>
> galaxy 50 million light years away
Do you have link to an image of 50 million light-years away?
You can take image of galaxies far away because they are enormous
Look at the [Andromeda galaxy](https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0612/m31abtpmoon.jpg)[ and the moon to scale](https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0612/m31abtpmoon.jpg). The andromeda galaxy huge but faint so you need to collect light for a long time. You can de the bight center with the naked eye but not the rest of the galaxy because it is to dim.
So the reason you can see other galaxies with your naked eye is not the size but because they are to dim.
Here is a galaxy 30-50 million light-years away [NGC_4697](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_4697) The apparent size is 4′.4 × 2′.8 this is 4×2 arcminutes or 240×120 arc seconds
An arcminute (‘) is 1/60 of a degree and an arcsecond (”) i 1/60 arch minute. You can look up the angular diameter of planets in our solar system [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter).
After the sun and moon venus has the largest apparent size to us when it is closest. It is 9.7″ – 1′6″ so when closest to use it is 1×1 arcminutes this is 1/8 if th size of the galaxy 30-50 million light-years.
A human eye can resolve between 20-60 arcseconds so we would see a galaxy at millions of light-years larger then a single dot if it was bright enough.
So because galaxies are so huge they can be larger than anything except the moon and the sun in our sky. Galaxies are not small but they are dim so you need a telescope that can collect a lot of light for a long time to spot them. It is not the magnification that it the primary goal for the most telescope but large light collecting capacity.
There are the limit of how small stuff, in angular size, you can see depending on the diameter of the telescope. To see the lunar lander on the moon that is around 4 meters wide you need a telescope with a 100-meter diameter lens. You would need to put it in space so you do not have any atmospheric effect.
The Hubble space telescope with a 2.4-meter mirror can only see stuff that is 200 meters in diameter on the moon.
[https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/moon-hoax-why-not-use-telescopes-to-look-at-the-landers](https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/moon-hoax-why-not-use-telescopes-to-look-at-the-landers)
So galasies is huger but faint so you need to collect a lot of light to see them with a large telescope and long observation time.
High magnification require enormous telescopes and you would need to put the in orbit so the atmosphere is not the limiting factor.
Latest Answers