Re: Is it possible to see the Moon Landing site from the surface of the Earth?

On Fri, 10 Mar 2006 08:18:03 -0800, Eric <nospam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So, if I've worked this backwards correctly my little 114mm (Celestron
114GT) can resolve about an object 1.4 miles across on the moon? ie 1.4
miles per pixel if i was to use a good digital camera?

There are different ways of defining "resolution". The way I'd look at
this, your 114GT, at f/9, has a physical Airy disk size of 12 um. I
prefer to use the size of the Airy disk as the primary metric for
resolution. Since your telescope has FL=1000 mm, 12 um at the focal
plane corresponds to 2.5 arcsec. At the distance to the Moon, that gives
4.6 km. In other words, the intrinsic size of the Airy disk produced by
your scope maps to a circle on the Moon that is 4.6 km in diameter.

Miles per pixel with a camera (at the distance of the Moon) depends only
on the focal length of your telescope and the size of the pixels. It is
unrelated to your optical resolution. If you were using a typical
astronomical camera with 9 um pixels, each pixel would cover 2.2 miles
on the Moon (3.1 miles on the diagonal).

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com
.

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