Best setup for moon detail

[Davey-T]

59 minutes ago, JOC said:

Well surely the space shuttle required an atmosphere as thick as the earths to land didn't she?  She glided like an aeroplane on those big wings of hers didn't she and got lift because of the passage of air over her wings.  Therefore she couldn't have landed on the moon, besides which there was no runway either and no rocket boosters to help her get back in the air again!!   LOL

 I don't think it could achieve the escape velocity to elude the Earths gravity.

Dave

[Mr trick]

9 hours ago, Ben the Ignorant said:

Mr trick, you wonder why spy satellites see details centimeters across on the Earth, but we can't see details smaller than hundreds of meters across on the Moon?

Spy satellites orbit a few hundred kilometers above the Earth, say a spy sat orbits about 400 kilometers above us. The Moon is about 400,000 kilometers away, 1,000 times more distant, thus it is 1.000 times more difficult to see features on the Moon.

it was the lunar orbiter's images I found that were taken from I think ,approx 31 miles away ,from lunar surface and much newer camera's/optics than 20 year old spy satellite I would imagine?  

I thought if I could see the rover, I could try and work out general scale, similar to looking at satellite images of earth

 Some of the photos I have seen so far on this site are absolutely mind blowing!  Some taken with iPhone! 

 I'm just having issues understanding the scale of images I am seeing. Observing images of a crater and I can't tell if it's 1m wide or 1000m wide.

 

[Putaendo Patrick]

To compliment your real lunar observing, you might want to download the free Virtual Moon Atlas. It a great program with some very powerful features. The right sidebar gives a lot of information including sizes. Top right there is a tap marked Tools, this will also allow you to measure distances.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualmoon/