Give me one good answer... Attempt to disprove this.

Hello everyone,

I have not written on ATS for a while although I am on everyday reading and reading like most of us do and I had been thinking to myself about this for a while now. I figured I would see what our fellow ATS'ers have to say about this, seeming as though we are better are getting to the truth than the government.

Give me one legitimate reason with an explanation as to why... (and not what the government has told us is "true")

Why are we able to see details on human faces, license plates, distant galaxies, etc... Using our telescopes and satellites but we are for some reason unable to see the area we "landed on the moon"???

The usual answer is not good enough for me. I don't want to hear the resolutions not good enough on our cameras to see it because the size of a license plate is 4 times smaller than the flag we left on the moon and we can read the letters off the plates of cars from space. I don't care if the picture is blurry and hardly visable show me something red white and blue on our moon and I will believe that we went there.

We are able to see planets light years away but we cannot see something billions of times closer???

Do not give into the usual answer because to someone with a brain it does not make sense. This is a question I would love for Neil Degrasse Tyson to answer.

Thanks everyone for your time and I hope to see valid responses soon.

"Religion is a business... I swear to god..."

There's answers for you here, it's a thought that has occured on here before

ATS flag on the moon post

Best answer i could see was you'd need a really, really big telescope, seemed reasonable to me

Your premis is wrong. We have good pictures of where we landed. Here's one place. Google the rest. They even have pictures of the flags casting shadows.

reply to post by ThinkB4uSpeak


Just my opinion, but to me your comparisons are illogical: License plates, stars...

What you're really asking is how come you can't use a telescope to see a red-white-and-blue grain of sand 5,000 miles away in a desert.

youre just missinformed. satellites have a resolution of about 3 metres per pixel.
if you'd like to build an amazing new telescope, i'm sure you'd see a flag on the moon.

Because we didn't go to the moon,

i believe a better question may be, with the technology we had back in the Sixties, why can't we replicate it? why can't we go back?

with the advancement of engineering one may assume it be quite simple, with the advancement of materials and knowledge one may assume it simple,

I think what the op means is when you use like google earth, everything comes up really clearly, but the likes of the moon is still blury and pathetic pictures.
To me, there are too many parts of it that are brushed out and blatently done as well.
In this day and age and also with the many countless digital pictures taken, it should all be as clear as google earth.
Why did China and the other countries who did photograph it really well, not disclose their photos is something I would like to know.

I remember a similar question being asked a while back and the question "Why cant we use hubble to look at the moon" was asked.
Many so-called experts gave reasons why it would not work. A few days later I came across pics of the moon taken by Hubble.
Dont believe everything your told!

Originally posted by ThinkB4uSpeak
We are able to see planets light years away but we cannot see something billions of times closer???

Do not give into the usual answer because to someone with a brain it does not make sense. This is a question I would love for Neil Degrasse Tyson to answer.

Thanks everyone for your time and I hope to see valid responses soon.

As other posters have said, your premise is wrong, but I thought I would try and add a bit more information.

While most people think of the moon as being relatively close to the earth, it is more than 350,000 km away. That is nearly 30 times the diameter of the earth. What you're asking is for someone to take a picture of a flag from more than 25 times the distance from one side of the Earth to the other!

When you say that we can 'see' planets light years away, they are not detected with incredibly zoomed in telescopes. The telescope most often referenced is Kepler, and as you can see on its wikipedia page:

Kepler's only instrument is a photometer that continually monitors the brightness of over 145,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view

In fact the field of view of Kepler is very wide indeed as you can see on this photo image:


So while we can detect planets many light years away, we can barely receive a few photons from them at best and we detect them through the dimming of their star (there are other techniques too numerous to go into)

In general, it would be possible to take a photograph of the flag etc if a mission were designed for that purpose. It would simply need to carry a very long focal length lens, which means it would have to be very heavy and the cost is going to be massive.

Nobody has bothered because the only people who would already know they landed on the moon.

Originally posted by Kino321
youre just missinformed. satellites have a resolution of about 3 metres per pixel.
if you'd like to build an amazing new telescope, i'm sure you'd see a flag on the moon.

the QuickBird satellite belongs to DigitalGlobe, Inc., of Longmont, Colorado, and takes pictures at 0.61 meters per pixel.

Originally posted by ThinkB4uSpeak
and we can read the letters off the plates of cars from space

Care to provide a valid source for that claim?

I think what the op means is when you use like google earth, everything comes up really clearly, but the likes of the moon is still blury and pathetic pictures.

the moon doesnt have aeroplanes flying around it taking photo's.

google earth does use satellite pic's but when you zoom in theyre merged with pics taken from aeroplanes.

can you take a detailed pic of a satellite? no, so why do people think vice versa?

Originally posted by scotsdavy1
I think what the op means is when you use like google earth, everything comes up really clearly, but the likes of the moon is still blury and pathetic pictures.

Actually some of the latest moon images are extremely high resolution. Certainly comparable with anything you'd get from space as a civilian. The high resolution Google Earth images are primarily done by flying a plane over the site. This is also how they do the new 3d cities feature.

To me, there are too many parts of it that are brushed out and blatently done as well.

The reason it's so blatent is that they're not brushing things out, they are compositing low and high resolution photographs together. I created this image (warning: massive) in order to provide a panorama of Mars from returned photos, but there were a few I had to use low resolution for.


As you can see, there are a lot of interesting lines formed where it looks manually done. In fact this is all automatic, and it is dictated by where the software was able to identify matching features. There are good explanations for every single 'anomaly' I have ever seen posted.

Why did China and the other countries who did photograph it really well, not disclose their photos is something I would like to know.

I don't know exactly what you're referring to, the best quality pictures ever taken are taken by NASA's LRO, these are all publicly available. JAXA also released their data but it is of lower quality.

reply to post by ThinkB4uSpeak


Earth's atmosphere limits the resolving power of any ground-based telescope to about 0.5"-1.0" – so they are out. Our Hubble Space Telescope in orbit does not suffer that limitation but with an aperture of only 94 inches its resolving power is only 0.05". So using our outdated Hubble at the Earth-Moon distance of 239,000 miles the smallest object it could clearly see would need to be about 300 feet across. The largest hardware (supposedly) left behind on the Moon is only about 31 feet across.

The pictures of the moon are utter crap and always will be. My dog could take better ones! Why with all the technology in this day and age, a brownie camera looks like what took images of the moon! Some very small parts are really clear, but vast parts are not at all.
And where did I say fly planes around the moon to take pictures? Grow up!
All the op said was why are there no decent pictures of the moon that was all!

Also, what about China will be releasing Hi Res images taken by the Chang’e-2 moon orbiter, which clearly show buildings and structures on the moons surface?

Do you know there were over 100 people in the Command Centre room alone?

100.........
100.......

Think, 100 people. Over 10,000 involved in making this happen. So out of, let's say, just the 100 people in the command centre (plus media and everything), none of these people said anything on their death bed.

Originally posted by scotsdavy1
The pictures of the moon are utter crap and always will be. My dog could take better ones! Why with all the technology in this day and age, a brownie camera looks like what took images of the moon! Some very small parts are really clear, but vast parts are not at all.

You're just repeating the same claim despite the fact it's not true. What sort of resolution would you like? They have as high as 0.5metres per pixel I believe, that is extremely high resolution!

Also, what about China will be releasing Hi Res images taken by the Chang’e-2 moon orbiter, which clearly show buildings and structures on the moons surface?

edit on 20-8-2012 by scotsdavy1 because: (no reason given)

I don't even understand what you're saying here. If they are not released, how do you know that they show buildings and structures?

A very few have been released, google it....

Originally posted by scotsdavy1
A very few have been released, google it....

No, you made the claim, it's your responsibility to support it. You said there are pictures of structures on the surface of the moon, so please prove it or retract the claim.

You also didn't answer the question about what resolution you want to see.