Let’s say President Obama sets up a Department of Doing Awesome Things, and the first program is to detonate a huge thermonuclear weapon on the surface of the Moon, “just because it will be so awesome.” government sources state.
Let us further assume that NASA constructs a launch vehicle sufficient to carry an absolutely humongous, 80-megaton device to the Moon, and detonates this bad boy 200 metres above the surface of the Moon, on the Earth side; let us further assume it goes off at Earth night somewhere on the Moon’s terminator (the line between light and dark."
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Would I be able to see this 80-megaton explosion of awesome with the naked eye?
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If not, how good would a 6-inch backyard Dobsonian do me?
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What would it look like? There’s no atmosphere on the Moon so I assume in some key ways it would look very different from blowing it up on the Earth.