Sore Eyes

This one time at astronomy camp... I once put a telescope in my

Dear Sir Patrick

Have you seen through telescopes the American flag on moon? Because an associate of mine does not believe that the Americans landed on the moon.

Thanking you in anticipation

Keith

This isn't Sir Patrick's site, I just happened to mention him in passing. However, I'll try to answer:

The moon is a quarter of a million miles away, and the flag is nowhere near big enough to be visible using your average ground-based telescopes. Turn the question round: consider the pictures of Earth as taken from the moon, and ask yourself whether you could see a flag planted in your garden from out there. Look at pictures of Earth taken from orbit, like the ones at Space Imaging. Take a look at the shots of the pyramids and of various urban areas which they have on that site. In most cases, you can't see anything flag-sized on those shots - they say they can resolve details down to the 2 metre level with 90% confidence.

That sounds like it's the sort of size at which you'd expect to be able to see a flag - until you remember that these shots were taken by satellites in Low Earth Orbit. The moon isn't just a few dozen miles away, it's a quarter of a million miles away; from here we just can't resolve that level of detail.

Although your specific question isn't addressed there, a good source of information with which to counter the various Apollo-hoax theories is the Bad Astronomy site.