How do we have the equipment to picture and see cosmos and stars millions of light years away, but can’t just zoom-in to examine and view the surfaces of our interplanetary planets in the solar system?
In: Physics
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?
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