Why can I see the American Flag in sea of tranquility on the moon?
I recall reading a tidbit in Sky and Telescope magazine in which one of the editors calculated that you would need a telescope with an aperture of several thousand inches to resolve a feature so small on the moon. Such a large telescope would be impractical. Nothing we have now can attain this resolution. And they did leave a reflector on the Moon so that astronomers can measure the distance to the moon to within several inches (another clinching piece of evidence that should dispel any conspiracy argument about the moon landings). Anyway, using a generous flag size of 1 meter and given an average distance of about 384 million meters to the Moon, resolving the flag is like resolving a golf ball from a distance of 6000 miles.
