The Official Astronomy Thread

Lol I don't know the answer to that question, but remember that the craters are very, very big actually. They just appear to be holes to us because we are seeing them from afar, so I don't think you would be able to see astronauts AFAIK :p
Some other forumite mentioned that NASA is planning a mission to the dark side of the moon.
 
i just wondered if it was possible for us to see them. i remember years ago at one of those day night cricket games that they turned one of the tv camera's on to the moon and it was really close and you could see some detail on the surface, granted it might not have been close enough to see the finer details but i am wondering if you could see something moving around there.
 
waynegohl said:
i just wondered if it was possible for us to see them. i remember years ago at one of those day night cricket games that they turned one of the tv camera's on to the moon and it was really close and you could see some detail on the surface, granted it might not have been close enough to see the finer details but i am wondering if you could see something moving around there.
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No, you won't be able to see astronauts on the surface, or even the lander and other vehicles. There is no Earth based telescope that can resolve that small an area, not even Hubble can do it.
 
Aliens? :p
With Crusader's, marine1's, Kalvaer's and my telescope, we can get really nice close up pics of the moon. And by close up, I mean the moon appears to be a fingertip away :)
 
Crusader said:
No, you won't be able to see astronauts on the surface, or even the lander and other vehicles. There is no Earth based telescope that can resolve that small an area, not even Hubble can do it.
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yeah i read somewhere that the Hubble wont be able to look at those kinda details on the moon. pity though.

but then again why can we not look at the moon its closer to earth then anything else, whats the point of having a telescope to look into the sky and admire a star far far away or whatever but not look at the moon which is closer and on which mankind might have walked. :confused:
 
Crusader said:
No, you won't be able to see astronauts on the surface, or even the lander and other vehicles. There is no Earth based telescope that can resolve that small an area, not even Hubble can do it.
Click to expand...

I read on wikipedia a while ago (search for moon landing) that the astronauts who landed on the moon placed "reflectors" on the surface. With some telescopes with lasers, you can point to it and it reflects back to "prove" people landed there.

Is this true?
 
yes i also heard something like that so they could measure the distance accuratly or something.
 
waynegohl said:
yeah i read somewhere that the Hubble wont be able to look at those kinda details on the moon. pity though.

but then again why can we not look at the moon its closer to earth then anything else, whats the point of having a telescope to look into the sky and admire a star far far away or whatever but not look at the moon which is closer and on which mankind might have walked. :confused:
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Well, you can look at the moon pretty closely. The problem comes with seeing something really small.

The Moon is 384,400 km away. At that distance, the smallest things Hubble can distinguish are about 60 meters wide. The biggest piece of left-behind Apollo equipment is only 9 meters across and thus smaller than a single pixel in a Hubble image.

Better pictures are coming. In 2008 NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will carry a powerful modern camera into low orbit over the Moon's surface. Its primary mission is not to photograph old Apollo landing sites, but it will photograph them, many times, providing the first recognizable images of Apollo relics since 1972.

The spacecraft's high-resolution camera, called "LROC," short for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, has a resolution of about half a meter. That means that a half-meter square on the Moon's surface would fill a single pixel in its digital images.

Apollo moon buggies are about 2 meters wide and 3 meters long. So in the LROC images, those abandoned vehicles will fill about 4 by 6 pixels.
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The other objects astronomers normally view are HUGE often hundreds of thousand kilometers or even light years across. So even though they are far away the can be seen relatively easily.

teraside said:
I read on wikipedia a while ago (search for moon landing) that the astronauts who landed on the moon placed "reflectors" on the surface. With some telescopes with lasers, you can point to it and it reflects back to "prove" people landed there.

Is this true?
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Yes, that is true and it has been done. Read more here.
 
No problem guys.

Here's a photo of the moon I took a while back by just holding a camera to the EP. It's a bit overexposed since I didn't use a filter, but you can see some nice crater details on the terminator. It's taken using 48x magnification.
 
EP = eyepiece. It's just a shorter way of typing. Of course at higher magnifications you would need a scope that can do some tracking. At 120x magnification I couldn't get anything except blurred images, since the moon travels too quickly through the field of view.
 
Crusader said:
EP = eyepiece. It's just a shorter way of typing. Of course at higher magnifications you would need a scope that can do some tracking. At 120x magnification I couldn't get anything except blurred images, since the moon travels too quickly through the field of view.
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So, Crusader, do you moon people? ;) :D :p Just kidding!
 
Crusader said:
Well, if they happen to walk by the telescope and see the huge reflection of the moon in the primary mirror then... yes! :p

Since we are still stuck on the moon... check out this amazing moon image by Russell Croman.
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I was looking at the other pics on that site, the ones of when they landed on the moon for the first time . . And i am just wondering, if there is no gravity in space, what stops the men walking the surface from just floating off? I mean why are they on there feet? And to me some of those pics look fake:rolleyes: I wonder if they really did ever land there:p

// ends thread derail . . sorry
 
Greylid said:
I was looking at the other pics on that site, the ones of when they landed on the moon for the first time . . And i am just wondering, if there is no gravity in space, what stops the men walking the surface from just floating off? I mean why are they on there feet? And to me some of those pics look fake:rolleyes: I wonder if they really did ever land there:p

// ends thread derail . . sorry
Click to expand...
There is gravity on the moon - 83% less than on earth though.

I think the whole moon landing conspiracy debate is best suited to another thread.
 
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