Can you see the American flag planted on the moon with a good telescope from earth?

Question

Also, who(how) put the cameras on the moon to tape Armstrong land on the moon?

Is the flag still on the moon? DId the US leave it there when they left the moon for the sixth time?

Answer 1

There are more then one US flags on the moon. You will not be able to see any of them with earth bound telescope due to resolution and brightness issues. The camera that videoed Neil is attached to an unfolding arm on the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module).

I believe (but do not know) that the first flag was planted so close to the LEM that it was knocked silly and then fell over during the launch back to earth / CM.

I think that the other flags are still upright.

Quote from "tham 153" ...
" There is a flag mounted on a flagpole at each of the six Apollo landing sites on the Moon. In addition, the descent stage of the rockets remain on the Moon, and have a flag painted on the side. And the four unmanned Surveryor spacecraft that landed on the Moon before the Apollo flights all have an American flag painted on the side. So there are 16 American flags on the Moon. (Not counting flags on spacecraft that crashed, as there are likely not recognizable.) "

And don't forget the following provable info...
Quote from Arbiter007...
"The laser retroreflector that was left by Apollo 11 is still there and still being used to measure and monitor the Moon's distance from Earth. "

You won't here the consperacy therorists talk about that handy little mirror stuck to the moon will ya!

Answer 2

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
Can you see the American flag planted on the moon with a good telescope from earth?
Also, who(how) put the cameras on the moon to tape Armstrong land on the moon?

Is the flag still on the moon? DId the US leave it there when they left the moon for the sixth time?

Answer 3

No, the flag is much too small and too far. Even our best and largest existing telescopes (Hubble and bigger) would render a football stadium sized object as a single pixel. To get yourself an impression, check out Google Earth and see what the smallest details are; and those pictures were taken from satellites that are orbiting Earth at less than 400 miles. The Moon is 250000 miles away.

The camera was attached to the side of the lunar lander, in a position where it could record the ladder and thus Armstrong's first step. Later, it was removed from there by the astronauts and positioned atop a tripod to give a general view of the astronauts' activities.

Each flag brought by each mission was left there. No lunar landing was done in proximity of another previous Apollo mission landing location.

Answer 4

No telescope on earth or even orbiting above the planet has the resolution to see any of the six flags on the Moon. You can, however, aim a laser at the Moon and see it reflected by the reflectors left on the surface by the astronauts for that purpose.

Answer 5

All six American flags planted in the lunar surface are still there but all are far too small to be seen from any telescope from Earth or by the Hubbelll Space Telescope in Earth Orbit
.

It is generally thought that the first one planted at Tranquility Base was knocked down by the rocket blast when the astronauts left.
.
The much larger decent stages of the lunar modules at each landing site are also too small to be seen.
.
.

Answer 6

No, you can't see it from Earth. You can't see it from the Hubble Space telescope either. It is too small of an object.

The cameras were attached to a robotic arm that swung out from the lunar module and took the pictures.

The flag is still on the moon.

Answer 7

The flag is only several feet across, but it's about a quarter million miles away. That's an angular size of under 1 milliarcsecond, which is far too small to be resolved by any current telescope.

The flag is still there. All six Apollo missions left behind flags.

The camera that recorded Armstrong's descent was mounted on the leg of the lunar module.
---
Jersey Boy: YouTube is not evidence. Most of what's on it is fiction designed to look like fact. I strongly suggest that you check out my source, which uses incontrovertible scientific evidence (not faulty common sense) to prove that we landed on the Moon.

Answer 8

its too small and even if you could see a flag up there you wouldn't be able to tell where it came from because radiation from the sun will have bleached it white.

Answer 9

A very interesting question about the current capacity of large telescopes, which relates to fundamental theories of OPTICS which are used in making telescopes and also filling prescriptions for your glasses. Resolution of the instrument viewing, size of the object, and distance of the object, are all key variables. These relationships have been worked out by a lot of people working over four centuries. So your question can be answered in terms of 1. Resolution of the instrument. 2. Size of the object. and 3. Distance of the object.

The unit we use to say "how big something is" in a telescope is a unit of arc. It's like saying how much of a circle would the object take up. In this discussion a degree, which is 1/360th of a circle, is too big a unit. The next unit is the arc minute, which is 1/60 of a degree. After that comes the arc second, which is 1/60th of an arc minute. The arc second is the unit we use in discussing distant and very small objects. We will employ a calculation constant known as the *radian* which is used not only in trigonometry but also by surveyors when they are judging the size of mountains and similar situations. In fact, when you buy binoculars they will tell you how many feet "wide" you can see at a distance of a thousand feet, and that calculation is identical to what follows.

We can use these numbers to get the relative size of different objects in a telescope:

A galaxy that is 100,000 light years long at a distance of 13 billion light years subtends (stretches across) about 1.5 seconds of arc.

Pluto at it's CLOSEST distance of 2.8 billion miles subtends .108 seconds of arc.

The resolution of the Hubble telescope is 0.048 seconds of arc. (Dawes' limit)

The resolution of the KECK telescope, which is one of the world's largest in operation, is .0116 seconds of arc.


1. A standard galaxy at the edge of the universe is about 30 times over Hubble's minimum resolution limit and 120 times over the Keck's minimum resolution limit.

2. Pluto is about 2 times *over* Hubble's minimum resolution limit. The light can be detected and so can the moon, but there is precious little detail. It is about 8 times *over* Keck's resolution limit.

3. A moon lander is about 27 times *under* Hubble's minimum resolution limit, and about 6 times *under* Keck's resolution limit. We're at about .0017 arc seconds here.

So:

Hubble *can* see Pluto's disk and Charon, but not enough to squeeze out a lot of detaill.
Hubble can't see moon landers or automobile sized objects on the moon. Neither can Keck.
Hubble *can* see galaxies at the edge of the universe.
Hubble can't see individual stars at the edge of the universe.
Hubble *can* see individual stars in some nearby galaxies.
Hubble *can* detect individual stars at the edge of the universe if they do us the courtesy of blowing up.

Incidentally, the same optical principles go into the calculations about whether it makes more sense to send a six inch telescope to Mars to take pictures from Mars orbit versus using a 100 inch telescope in Earth orbit. As you may guess, it usually makes more sense to send a small telescope and a radio transmitter billions of miles away rather than attempt to use a larger one close to home.

You can test the optical theory yourself. A Toyota Corolla measure about 3 meters long. If you sit down at the side of a Corolla, at a distance of one meter, you can calculate using the formula

(3/1)*57.3=172 degrees, or almost half a circle. That is, if you sit down in the middle of a car with it only three feet in front of you, about all you can see is the car, right?

For the moon lander problem it is important to keep the units the same. Assume a moon lander is the same size as a car, roughly. Then it is .003 meters long. The distance on average is around 370,000 kilometers. Our first answer, about the car in front of you, is in degrees. But we need an answer in arc seconds so we're going to need to multiply by 60, to turn a degree into arc minutes, and by sixty again, to turn arc minutes into arc seconds. So you would calculate

(.003/370,000)*57.3*3600=.0017 arc seconds. That's very very tiny. In the sit-next-to-a-car example we had almost 180 degrees. Here we are talking thousandths of just one arc second which is 1/60th of a minute which is 1/60th of just one degree. The image of a lunar landar to the eye is smaller than a dust mote. That's why you can't see it when you just look at the moon. But as it turns out, even a very, very good telescope STILL can't see it. The optics are extremely well known. It is used in surveying, in glasses, in making binoculars, in telescope gun sights. It is based on the physics of light and it doesn't change when we start looking at the moon.

The limit of a telescope is derived from Dawes limit which is

.116/(aperture of telescope in meters)

I'm not going to get into moon conspiracy theory. What I would suggest, is that the same science that helps fill out a prescription for your glasses also tells us the limits of what a telescope can do. People who willfully mis-represent the power of telescopes in order to further their theory are deliberately spreading falsehoods about commonly known optical principles. I would think that if people deliberately spread falsehoods about something as simple as basic optics, we can conclude that they are likely not to be honest about other things as well.

Hope that helps,
GN

Answer 10

We never reached the moon it that race. It was all filmed in area 51. This vid should explain it all

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khDI2MsWSYc

it's divided into parts so you will have to find the rest of them on youtube