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Originally posted by @freakykbh
Or, conversely, when we have a telescope powerful enough to see minute details of the moon...
Makes one wonder why they don't simply train one of the thousands we do have on it!
We have satellites a million miles out, but 250,000 is just too far for us to focus on.
Weird, huh.

If you researched just a TINY bit about telescopes and the limits thereof you would find out why we can't see footprints on the moon. But you don't want that do you? You just want to pull out of your ass anything that you think supports the fake moon landing crap.

I can show you easily enough but I am sure I will be wasting my time since you will say, all that math, fuk that math stuff, just prove it, so anyway here it is:

A half ass home telescope can see about one second of arc, so that means it can split a circle out there into 1,296,000 parts no matter what the distance. So you figure the distance to the moon, call it 250,000 miles, that is only the radius, you need the circumference of the circle with radius of that, so 250,000 X 2 gives diameter, so 500,000 miles is the diameter and that times PI gives the circle that telescope can spit it up into the parts it can see.

So just rounding out, call PI 3.0000 forget the rest for illustration, the circle is now about 1.5 million miles around. So splitting that 1.5 million mile circle into 1.2 million parts means at 250,000 miles the object has to be over a mile, call it a mile and half, say 8000 feet. That is the absolute minimum a house telescope can see at the distance to the moon.

So it can see NOTHING under 8000 feet wide unless it's a spotlight, it would for sure see the light but not the source that generates the light.

So we go to the best one, mostly, Hubble, it sees 25 times better than that so divide 8000 by 25 and you find it impossible to make out something even 300 feet wide so even hubble will NEVER see footprints.

It would have to be a thousand times stronger to make out some kind of footprint on the moon and NOTHING on Earth has that kind of power, not the big boys scopes where they concentrate the light from 3 or 4 scopes and simulate a mirror bigger than a football field, even that can maybe bring that 300 foot size down to maybe 100 feet or so, can't see anything under 100 feet wide.

This is how it works. I have actually studied that stuff and I know what I am talking about.

You can call it rubbish or whatever, that is the limit of scopes on Earth looking at the moon.
The only way we can see footprints is to be VERY close to the surface.

Say we have a scope capable of 1 arc second or resolution in a craft close to the surface, we can calculate how close we need to be to suss out a one foot wide object:

We just go backwards from the fact one arc second cuts a circle into 1.2 million parts so the circumference is 1.2 million feet to figure out the radius of that circle which happens to be about 40 miles so the scope with one arc second res has to be closer than 40 miles to see footprints.
So a Hubble scope can be 25 times further, 1000 miles away, it can suss out a footprint.

So it has to be 250 times closer to the moon than it is to suss out footprints optically.

I hope I didn't waste my time telling this to you. But that is the long and short of it.

Originally posted by @sonhouse
If you researched just a TINY bit about telescopes and the limits thereof you would find out why we can't see footprints on the moon. But you don't want that do you? You just want to pull out of your ass anything that you think supports the fake moon landing crap.

I can show you easily enough but I am sure I will be wasting my time since you will say, a ...[text shortened]... lly.

I hope I didn't waste my time telling this to you. But that is the long and short of it.

No, you did not waste your time: I find it highly interesting... and informative.
I mean, I already knew some of it, but that's a great explanation, so thanks.

So, why not use one of the thousands of satellites?

Originally posted by @freakykbh
No, you did not waste your time: I find it highly interesting... and informative.
I mean, I already knew some of it, but that's a great explanation, so thanks.

So, why not use one of the thousands of satellites?

So what is the difference in distance to the moon between a scope on Earth and a scope 1000 miles in space? 240,000 miles V 230,000 miles? less than a half percent gain in usable resolution? Not very helpful if you are trying to see one foot size objects on the moon. I showed Hubble needs to be 250 times closer OR a mirror about 250 times bigger a mirror. Hubble has a mirror about 2 meters in diameter so a mirror of half a kilometer diameter might do it and then if it is in space, near Earth orbit.
Gonna be awhile before that happens.

They call mirrors coming up 'Giant' mirrors or some such, future mirrors 30 meters in diameter (made of dozens of much smaller mirrors locked into place and having solenoids on the back and a high power laser pointing where the scope is aimed and they see the atmosphere bounce the laser around at the 50 mile high level, and they adjust the mirror with a thousand solenoid actuators to eliminate as much of the atmospheric jumble as possible and in fact the best present day scopes are something like 2 to 3 times the res of Hubble in spite of the fact they are seeing through 50 miles of air.

Another technique is making two or more telescopes separated by some distance and using tricky laser connections make the res about the same as the distance between the mirrors so two scopes of 2 meter diameter mirrors 50 meters apart can approach the res of a single mirror of 50 meters diameter.

The down side is they still collect the same amount of light as those two 2 meter mirrors whereas a real 50 meter mirror (not even close to being built yet) besides having much higher resolution, collects hundreds of times the photons per second so they can get an imaging job done hundreds of times faster BESIDES having great resolution and with adaptive optics with lasers shooting out and deforming the mirrors in real time, gets close to a mirror in space where there is no atmospheric aberration so they don't need fancy laser and adaptive optics with the hundreds of drivers under the mirrors distorting the mirrors a thousand times per second a wee amount to correct for the aberration and distortions of the atmosphere, getting their cake and eat it too.