• Deme@sopuli.xyz
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      3 months ago

      You’d need either the biggest space telescope ever that doesn’t yet exist, or a lunar orbiter. The latter is how other space agencies have taken pictures of the landing sites.

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Now I’m curious, what’s the resolution (like in meters) of a good home pro telescope watching the moon at say the best of times?

        • Deme@sopuli.xyz
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          3 months ago

          I’m no astronomer or astrophotographer, but this picture of the moon clocks in at around 320 meter angular resolution. That being said, a lot of post-processing goes into a shot like that, so some detail may be lost due to that. The atmosphere of the Earth is pretty difficult to deal with as its disturbances cause fuzziness and shimmering. Stacking multiple frames can help, but it’s still never perfect. Earth based telescopes sometimes shoot a laser up along their line of sight to get an idea of how the atmosphere is messing with them.

          For comparison, The Hubble space telescope gets around 90 m angular resolution for objects at the distance of the Moon.

      • cheddar@programming.dev
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        3 months ago

        Isn’t this because Hubble is actually made to look deep into space and not under its nose? I’m sorry, but I’m not watching a 14 minutes video for that.

        • Deme@sopuli.xyz
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          3 months ago

          I did a two minute internet search and every result says that the Hubble doesn’t have the angular resolution for this. It could resolve a football field on the moon, but not anything smaller.

          It was made to look at nebulae and galaxies, and those are a lot bigger, even in apparent size.

          Focal distance doesn’t matter when the aperture is so infinitesimally small compared to the distances. All space telescopes are focused to infinity no matter what they’re observing up there.