Why not try this

[fuzzball]

Now I'm new to all this conspiracy stuff, but I was thinking, that if NASA put a spaceship on the moon, surely the lander base section is still there. So why can't someone point a powerful telescope towards the area where the Apollo mission landed and take a photo of the lander. If Hubble can take a photo of stars billions of light years away, the moon should be no problem. Then we have more proof.
How powerful would a telescope need to be to see a gold foil covered lander module which was a few meters across, which is always in the sunlight? I'm surprised we can't see the reflected light from here with an off the shelf type of telescope.

Just for the record I think that man has been to the moon, and it would be a shame to find out that we haven't.

[JayUtah]

Hubble can see objects only about 80-90 meters wide on the moon -- no smaller. It's not a matter of distance; it's a matter of angular size. The distant objects Hubble photographs are immensely huge. It's just like how you can't see a penny from 100 feet away with your naked eye, but you can see a football stadium from miles off.

[sts60]

Apollo 11 and 13-17 landed on the near side of the Moon, that is, the side that always faces Earth. They're in darkness roughly half the time, though at "new Moon" the reflected light from the Earth would make it easy to see walk around there (in your spacesuit, of course!) without a handlight.

Sorry - welcome to the board, fuzzball!

[martin]

sts60 said:

Apollo 11 and 13-17 landed on the near side of the Moon, that is, the side that always faces Earth. They're in darkness roughly half the time, though at "new Moon" the reflected light from the Earth would make it easy to see walk around there (in your spacesuit, of course!) without a handlight.

Sorry - welcome to the board, fuzzball!

For Apollo 13, maybe this is for planned landing site only. But so Apollo 12 is only one landing on far side of the moon? If there is no atmospheric scattering for radio signal, then I think communication with spacecraft is impossible when it is on the far side of the moon. Am I right on this? Maybe a signal can be relayed from orbiting part of spacecraft, but when it is in a low orbit, I think this does not help much.

Martin

Edit - also, even when a telescope can see an apollo site, I do not think this will persuade any one. If they do not believe now, they will say images from telescope are fakes also.

[Bob B.]

martin said:

For Apollo 13, maybe this is for planned landing site only. But so Apollo 12 is only one landing on far side of the moon?

All the landing sites were on the near side of the Moon. I think sts60 must have meant Apollo 11-12 and 14-17.

One HB claim is that the planned Apollo 13 landing site was in darkness, but this was only true at the time of launch. Had the landing occured as scheduled, the site would have rotated into daylight. Some people get confused into thinking this means Apollo 13 was to land on the far side of the Moon, but this is untrue.

martin said:

If there is no atmospheric scattering for radio signal, then I think communication with spacecraft is impossible when it is on the far side of the moon. Am I right on this?

Unless there is some way to relay the signal, a direct line-of-sight is necessary for comminications. There was a loss of signal everytime Apollo passed behind the Moon.

[Bob B.]

fuzzball said:

If Hubble can take a photo of stars billions of light years away, the moon should be no problem.

The Hubble cannot take pictures of individual stars from billions of light years. It can only take pictures of large objects like galaxies at those distances. Any Hubble pictures you may have seen showing individual stars were taken at much shorter distances, and even then the Hubble cannot resolve the discs of stars -- they are only points of light.

You must realize that, although galaxies lie at great distances, they are extremely large. For example, the Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter. If viewed from a distance of 10 billion light years, the Milky Way would subtend an angle of,

arctan(100,000/10,000,000,000) = 2.06 arcseconds

On the other hand, the base of the LM is only 4.3 m across and lies at a distance of 385,000 km. Thus, the LM subtends an angle of,

arctan(4.3/385,000,000) = 0.0023 arcseconds

So as you can see, a distance galaxy can appear almost 1,000 larger than the Apollo artifacts on the Moon. The Hubble, or any other telescope, cannot see something as small as the Apollo hardware at the Earth-Moon distance.

[fuzzball]

Ok, so that explains why nobody has done it before.

On well, back to the drawing board...

[sts60]

All the landing sites were on the near side of the Moon. I think sts60 must have meant Apollo 11-12 and 14-17.

Bob is indeed correct. That's what I meant, but I managed to include 13 when I meant to exclude it, and I seem to have forgotten there's an integer between 11 and 13. Oops.

[Glom]

The problem is airy discs. Even if a telescope was perfect and free of hindering factors, the one thing that is unavoidable, hardwired into the laws of optics, is airy discs caused by diffraction as light passes through the aperture of the telescope. If two objects are so near in the image that their airy discs overlap, they would be indistinguishable. The Rayleigh criterion gives us the absolute limit of resolution in ideal conditions.

Maximum resolution = 1.22 × Wavelength / Aperture diameter

If we take the wavelength to be 700nm, the short limit of visible light and the angular size of the LM is 0.0023 arcseconds as Bob B. calculates, then the aperture required would be 76.6m, which is bigger than any optical telescope in existence.

NB don't forget to convert the angle to radians.