What would be the resolution if the Hubbell telescope was pointed at the moon? 10m? 1m?
Or know how to use apostrophes: “the Moons surface”; “The Ballistic Missile Defense Organizations faster, better, cheaper Clementine probe”; “Apollo 15s lunar module”.
And what the hell is this clumsy bollocks: “during their over three-day stay”?
Sheesh, what a shit piece of writing. Didn’t they have sub-editors back in 2001?
i’m not familiar with telescopes. i know direct light is of course stronger than a reflection but, can anyone elaborate and help me wrap my head around how we can make out galaxies ???000000 light years away and not be able to inspect our moon closely?
About 60 meters, which is why we can’t view any artifacts from the moon landings.
On the other hand, scientists analyzing photos taken by the unmanned Clementine lunar orbiter believe it captured photographic evidence of the Apollo 15 landing site:
Perhaps because your average galaxy is much, much larger than the Moon.
We sent up Celmentine and Lunar Prospector in the 90s, and will send up the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter next October.
The ESA sent up SMART-1 in 2003.
Japan launches a mission tomorrow, and China and India are sending up orbiters within the next year.
They’re way ahead of you.
but the moon is also much, much nearer. am i correct to say that we can see the flag if we wanted to; we just didn’t build any telescopes for the purpose?
About fifty/fifty. Pretty good for the naked eye, eh? 
No, really? As mentioned in post #7 and commented on in posts #18 and #22? Never! 
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
No. Such a telescope would be far beyond the resolving power of any ever built.
Film at eleven!
Many celestial sights are actually larger than you’d expect, sometimes a lot larger. They’re just really dim. For illustration, check out this remarkable image comparing the true size of the Andromeda Galaxy with our Moon, in terms of the amount of sky they take up as viewed from Earth. I don’t know about you, but I found it quite an eye-opener.
Let’s put it this way. The Andromeda galaxy spans 7 full moon diameters while sitting a whopping 60,000,000 times further away.
Space is big.
The flag is roughly a metre or so in size, and is 4 x10^8 metres away.
The galaxy that we are in is about 10^21 metres across. The nearest galaxy roughly the same size is the Andromeda galaxy, which is about 2.5 x 10^22 metres away from us. To quote the Wikipedia article on it,
So you can see another galaxy with the naked eye – but that flag is so small that no telescope could be built that could see it. Galaxies are really, really big.
ah… i get the picture now, thanks for the replies. and thanks for the beautiful link, Cervaise.
I’m so glad to see something new going up to the moon. It’s been sad that we haven’t sent numerous satellites to analysis the moon better in the last three decades. Going with cheaper in mass quantities could have served us better.
Are you aware just how hard it is to get a stable orbit around the moon? I’m not talking a few weeks, such as for the Apollo missions, but more than a few months. There’s been discussion in NASA in how to accomplish this, since a lunar satellite network is believed to be a good thing for a Moon Base, but trying to find an orbit that’s likely to last more than a few months, without constant correction burns is very difficult. Between the effect of the Earth’s gravity on anything in orbit around the Moon, and the “lumpiness” of the moon’s own gravitational field, moon orbiting satellites just don’t seem to do very well.
IIRC the only orbit they’ve found that has a hope of being long-term stable is something inclined at an angle of 70 degrees to the plane of the moon’s rotation. I’ll try to find a cite for this, but it might take me a while.
I have a telescope which could see the flag on the moon.
You’d just have to get the telescope to the Moon, too, first. Preferably within a mile or so of the landing site.