What I mean is this. Suppose that I am 20km far from the moon. I can see soil details, craters, etc. Then I move to 100km away from the moon. I look at the moon again and now I am unable to see the same level of details as before. Why?
Then comes the real question. We look at distant stars and planets using telescopes. I know that the current telescopes are not about enlarging pictures but gathering photons. But suppose we had at our disposal a telescope with infinite enlargement functionality. Would we be able to choose a planet, distant as hell and enlarge it to the point we could see its surface details or is detail lost forever as the light travels?
If it is lost, how it is lost?
# fantastic answers! THANKS!
In: Physics
Your eye has a certain level of resolution. You can only see so much detail because, at further distances, the minutes of angle that the object takes is too small for your eye to resolve, and all you get is an approximation instead of the details.
A telescope is no different. If you are “enlarging” the image by collecting more photons, you’re collecting more photons from that object, sure, but you’re also collecting a lot more “garbage” at the same time.
Another way of looking at it is that, as distance increases, the photons reflected by the object spread out. Photons are only reflected so fast (in terms of photons/time, not speed of the photons), so eventually, the rate of photons coming to you from the object become a miniscule proportion of the number of total photons coming from that area. Therefore, your object gets drowned in the noise of other, random photons entering your aperture/lens
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