If we have the largest telescope in the world, can we see the flag on the surface of the moon?

Question

I recently found this reel on instagram that we have captured a little image/video of the sun.

Given how far the earth is to the moon, could it be possible for us to see the flag on the surface on the moon then if man actually landed on the moon?

In: 1074

Answer 1

Satellites in space taking pictures of Earth have managed to get like a square meter to one pixel of resolution. So a flag on the surface of Earth being smaller, it would look like a block of colour averaged from the flag and the ground around it. So no not yet, we can not see that flag from Earth. You also should consider how we see things, from light reflecting, now think of a sea urchin growing out into space. Up close those light reflections seem intense, with distance there are massive gaps between them. How can you capture all the light that hit the flag if it is spreading out over distance? You would need a lens the size of Earth, or something special (like software) that can make images and patterns from the diffracted and reflected light with missing pieces. Lot’s of people would claim that’s a digital recreation and not photo or image (not me, all the same thing in the end, your brain is a computer and runs software). So a lot of detailed images of space are not images of visible light wave range radiation, like what our eyes detect, they’re usually some other wavelength, like infrared, and a computer chooses colour gradients based on intensity or absorbance of the infrared, like a see in the dark camera, remember when they were all green, then they were like, let’s make red mean more heat, and it looked different but was the same signal. Green was a more analog display of intensity, the red to blue is software colour coding intensity to make the image easier to pick information out of. X-rays used to be creepy photos of density burned into film proportionally as it blocks x-rays depending on mass and density. Now we computer enhance those images, and they are not true photos, but they better represent what is actually physically inside us. So they’re an illusion of math and computers, but yet more accurate than reality.