It is also worth noting that even if you could see the flags on the Moon at a high resolution, they are all white by now. More details about this are in this article: Why do we put telescopes in space? On Earth, we have telescopes like the Gran Canarias telescope with a diameter of 10.5 m. The Hubble has an aperture of 2.4 meters and the James Webb is 6.5 m. This is the main reason why photos taken by space telescopes are much better than those taken from Earth even though they are not that big. It is important to note that space telescopes like the Hubble and the JWST have a big advantage in this, and that is that their images are not being distorted by Earth’s atmosphere, which allows them to have a much better resolution and detail. Even the Hubble or the James Webb aren’t big enough to reach that level of magnification. The flags are only 121 centimeters (4 ft) long and the average home telescope can only see objects larger than 1.5 kilometers (0.9 mi). No, it is not possible for a telescope to see the flags on the Moon. The flag left on the Moon by the Apollo 11 crew was 121 cm long (4 ft). I’ll spare you the math, but if we do this calculation for the Hubble telescope, the result is about 100 meters, or about the size of a football field, and when you do it for a backyard telescope with an aperture of 130mm, the result is approximately 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles). Knowing this, you can calculate the resolution of a telescope, and with that, the spatial extent, which is basically the minimum size that an object would have to be for a telescope to be able to see it. The Moon is located on average at a distance of 384,400 kilometers (238,855 miles) away from Earth. Can a telescope see the flag on the moon? Buzz Aldrin and the US flag left during the Apollo 11 mission Well, let’s answer that once and for all in this article. The other flag is Chinese, it was affixed by the robotic lander of the Chang’e 5 spacecraft as the mission wasn’t manned.Ī common question people have when they are considering buying their first telescope is if it is possible to take a look at these flags using a regular backyard telescope. Six of them are American and they were left by each of the Apollo missions that successfully landed on the Moon ( Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17) between 19. There are currently 7 flags planted on the surface of the Moon.
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