There’s one other point to consider – you’d be trying to look at the flag edge-on.
Okay…
I was typing in a hurry and the words did not come out clearly. What I really meant is, if cities were on the moon, could one see their lights when looking into the night side (as in the dark side of the terminator) of the moon from Earth? On the moon, did the Apollo astronauts see Earth’s cities? Of course, when looking at terrestrial cities, you have the atmosphere and its weather and pollution in the way.
True - from just a few hundred feet above, probably even less, it would be difficult to differentiate the edge-on top of a non-waving flag from any other scratch in the terrain.
Didn’t the flags get knocked over when the Ascent burner got lit on the LEM?
On one of the launches, I think that happened. There is a private company that’s planning on sending unmanned craft to the Moon to photograph the landing sites, among other things.
That would work if the main limitation was motion blur. As I explained, the main limitation is the distortion caused by the earth’s atmosphere. Once you overcome that with adaptive optics, you face the diffraction limit which you can only overcome by increasing the aperture or using interferometry.