Would I of been able to see the Moon Landing in 1969 with a telescope?

by Garrett159

Say i'm a someone with a telescope in 1969 and I zoom in on the moon. Could I see the moon landing?

madjic

I think that's more a question for /r/askscience and has been answered here

panzerkampfwagen

The answer is no. If you built a football stadium on the Moon and took a picture of it with the Hubble it'd appear as 1 or 2 pixels in size. You have to remember how far away the Moon is verses how big astronauts and their tiny spacecraft were. The Moon is about 380,000 km away from the Earth.

It's a common mistake people make that telescopes really zoom up on distant objects. While they do zoom they get most of their power from collecting a lot of light. Take the Andromeda Galaxy for instance. You may think that a telescope zooms up on it to take those pictures you see of it. However, in the sky the Andromeda Galaxy is about 6 FULL MOONS across in the sky. It's massive. You just don't notice this 6 Full Moons across galaxy in the sky because it's dim due to the distance (over 2 million light years).

Your other problem is that in 1969 you would have been using a ground based telescope and with them the atmosphere limits how small an object you can see as the atmosphere distorts the light that passes through it. That's one of the advantages of the Hubble, it's not that it's a big telescope (there's bigger on Earth), it's that it doesn't have to worry so much about an atmosphere screwing up its view.

Commustar

This is an interesting question, and it also seems to have a scientific element to it. You might consider x-posting to /r/AskScience.