We can?
I have an extremely high res picture of Pluto on my computer that takes up hundreds of gigabytes of space. In it I can zoom in to details the size of about a football field. And that’s not even the level of detail professional astronomers can achieve.
A better question is: why aren’t we creating tons of high res images of the planets and objects within our own solar system. And the answer to that is, we have and they aren’t really that interesting beyond the novelty of them.
We’ve been looking at all planets (not Pluto) in our own solar system with varying degrees of “zoom” for nearly 200 years. Most of them are visible with the naked eye, so magnification on even a small scale has produced some pretty good resolution. And to a certain point that was useful. But by the time your average enthusiast could see details of small craters on the moon with a couple hundred dollar set, we had gotten to the point where it was sort of pointless to be viewing the surface of local planets with super high powered telescopes. You can’t tell a lot of important features through a lens, no matter how powerful. So we started sending probes and rovers instead, and using/building those telescopes to view objects currently beyond our reach.
Imagine it this way: you have a nice telescope. You can use it to look at things very far away with some detail, things you are likely unfamiliar with. Or you can look at familiar things that are much closer with incredible detail (but still less detail than you would have from just being there).
Would you use the telescope to read the sign at the end of your street? Or would you use it to look at the moon and just walk to the sign if you want to read it?
The bottom line is that luminosity is tricky. A star 10,000 light years away may be far brighter than our sun, but the sun obviously appears brighter because it’s so close. We can see distant objects primarily because they are ridiculously bright and sending us their light from across the universe.
The next thing to consider, planets don’t emit their own light, they are reflecting the light from the sun. So while they are rather dim objects, they are close to us so they appear brighter than most stars in the night sky. And while we can actually see some pretty amazing detail of these planets with a telescope on the Earth, there’s still a lot we can’t see because it’s just too far away, but “zooming in” as it were, has its limits in the detail we can see.
Finally, stars from distant solar systems mostly just look like bright blobs, so while they are astoundingly bright, we don’t end up seeing much in the way of detail. Looking at distant galaxies are pretty cool too, but the detail we’re seeing in them is still limited because of distance. In an individual galaxy you can’t even really tell a single star, it’s just a swirly pattern, but the whole thing is made up of a billion billion stars so it’s altogether even brighter than the stars closer to us. The “detail” we supposedly see in distant galaxies is actually billions of stars making up this thing, this pattern.
So we actually can see better detail in the planets in our solar system, it just appears that we’re getting less detail compared to distant galaxies, but yeah, those things are huge, absolutely ginormous, so there appears to be greater detail, but it’s actually all more fuzzy, with individual stars not even discernable other than we know they are there.
Most of the high-resolution photos from deep space are of positively ***MASSIVE*** things that dwarf the imagination. Those photos aren’t snapshots, with quick lens openings. They involve leaving the lens open on the camera for hours, if not days. This allows for much more light to be captured, increasing resolution. However, if *anything* moved to any noticeable degree, it would be incredibly blurry because you’re capturing the light the whole time. The planets move too fast to even hope to zoom in like that.
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