Can a Telescope See Astronauts’ Boot Prints on the Moon?

hubie writes:

Even Earth's mightiest telescopes aren't up to the task of imaging Apollo lunar landing sites. A lack of resolution is the biggest reason why:

Back in the early 2000s, when I was butting heads seemingly every week with people who believed the Apollo moon landings were faked, such individuals would pull out an argument they thought was their ace in the hole: If NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to see the intricate details of distant galaxies, why can't it see the Apollo astronaut boot prints on our own moon?

Like most conspiratorial thinking, this argument seems persuasive on its surface but falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. Those taken in by it have a misunderstanding of two things: how telescopes work and just how big space is.

Many people think a telescope's purpose is to magnify images. Certainly manufacturers of inexpensive (read: cheap) telescopes love to market them as such: "150x power!" they print in huge lettering on the box (along with highly misleading photographs from much bigger telescopes). While magnification is important, a telescope's real strength is in its resolution, however. The difference is subtle but critical.

Magnification is just how much you can zoom in on an object, making it look bigger. That's important because while astronomical objects are physically big, they're very far away, so they appear small in the sky. Magnifying them makes them easier to see.

Resolution, on the other hand, is the ability to distinguish two objects that are very close together. For example, you might perceive two stars orbiting each other-a binary star-as a single star because they're too closely spaced for your eye to separate. You can't resolve them. Looking through a telescope with higher resolution, however, you might be able to discern the separation between them, revealing that they are two individual stars.

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