Is it possible to see the American flag that was planted on the moon from earth ??
Does anyone have any photos ?
Is there any reason why we can not ???
I think the answer is …probably … but they choose not too.
Er - no way. The moon is roughly a quarter of a million miles away. The flag is maybe a couple of feet across.
Think of the view you have from an airplane of the ground. The roofs of houses are tiny specks; a flag spread out on the roof of a house couldn’t be seen.
That’s at a distance of 35,000 feet. The moon is about 1,320,000,000 feet away. That’s almost 38 thousand times as far away as your airplane is from the ground.
So, no.
- Rick
I am looking at some huble information
It can make out fine details on a “quarter” 10 miles away
The hubble to the moon at there cloest path are 238,500 miles
no idea how big a quarter is … an inch ? 2.5 cm ?
From the The Official NASA Hubble Telescope FAQ’s:
As to “choosing not to” use the Hubble to view the moon -
Astronomers submit far more proposals than can be done. Why spend limited, expensive research time for a meaningless task? Would those who doubt the validity of the Apollo missions change their minds if Hubble showed photos, or would they just claim this is another hoax?
Cecil’s column on the moon hoax.
Which Hubble information are you looking at? Is it online?
Just being able to see a quarter at 10 miles would be a resolution of .00001 arcseconds (let’s see, 1 inch divided by 238500 miles times 180/Pi…that checks), whereas this site says the Hubble can go down to .0072 arcseconds resolution.
That’s the pixel resolution (pixel size) of one of the detectors. But the resolution of the image is only as good as the resolution of the telescope, i.e. 0.1 arcsec.
By the way, if I did my calculation correctly, at a distance of 10 miles 0.1 arcsec translates to 8mm (1/3 inch). So the Hubble should be able to resolve a quarter 10 miles away as a disc.