Actually we can’t see the surface of a star light-years away. We can see a star as point of light because it’s really bright, but throug a telescoep it still looks like an infinitely small point of light. Not even the Hubble can see surface features on other stars.
We can see patterns in galaxies and gas clouds (nebulae), but nebulae are typically many light-years in diameter, and galaxies are tens of thousands of light-years across.
Actually, the star Betelgeuse has been resolved as a disk, revealing some surface detail. But Betelgeuse is relatively close and exceptionally large - if you placed it at the center of our solar system, its surface would extend out well past the orbit of Mars!
Worse than that. If the flag is still upright, you’d be seeing the thing edge-on. If it was blown over by the exhaust taking off, then it was also probably covered in dust from the same event.
The “pro-Moon side” goes something like this:
Actually, it’s the Earth-landing that was faked. Generations of humanity have been duped by the corporate-military-industrial complex to believe that we live on the Earth, when really we all live on the Moon, inside a large sound-stage (like they use in Hollywood for movies, but bigger). No-one has ever been to the Earth–it’s uninhabitable, kind of like Venus, but less sulfur–but scientists who are members of the c-m-i-c dreamed it up to help us to feel better about where we do live. That’s why the Matrix was such a controversial, popular movie, because it tapped into our collective subconscious awareness that reality isn’t real.
If you have problems accepting this, stop drinking metropolitan water for a few weeks and let all of the drugs get out of your system. But don’t switch to bottled or ‘distilled’ water: that’s got even more mind-altering chemicals in it. You’ll have to find a supply of fresh well water that hasn’t been tampered with. (As if that won’t be a challenge!)
From what I’ve heard, the flags probably don’t exist anymore. They were made of thin nylon cloth, which after a few decades of direct sunlight and vacume would turn to dust.
But the bottom part of the lander would still be there, as well as the rovers and other junk. There’s lots to see besides a flag.
But as has been pointed out, it’s too small and its relative motion is tremendously fast.
Offtopic nitpick, but: Diffraction is what makes a pinhole camera work poorly, limiting the sharpness of images. A pinhole camera works because light travels in straight lines unless it’s got a good reason not to.
Yes, there is no telescope that can see the flag, AFAIK only the film cameras on the orbiters did pick up the shadows of the lunar landers:
http://www.tass-survey.org/richmond/answers/lunar_lander.html
Of course, that will be no good for the moon hoaxer proponents. After years of patiently explaining all the evidence and debunking all the silly arguments of the believers of a moon hoax, I am ready to go “Buzz Aldrin” on them!