A coworker of mine started falling down the YouTube conspiracy rabbit hole. He said something about the moon landing maybe being a hoax. I told him that when I was in college I used the big telescope to look at the moon landing site, so I knew for sure it was real. After that, he believed in the moon landing.
Now of course I was lying about seeing the moon landing site. Terrestrial telescopes can’t see the landing site. I convinced my friend to believe the truth by countering a lie from a stranger with a lie from someone he trusts.
Pedantry alert, neerrrr:
You can see the moon landing sites easily enough if you know where to look, and can match up the geography easily. What you can’t do from the ground is what a lot of folks expect, which is see any of the left behind equipment, rover tracks, boot prints, flags, etc. for a couple of reasons. First, the features are too small to be physically possible for a purely optical telescope to actually resolve. And even then, the random motion of the Earth’s atmosphere would distort your image too much to make out anything that small at that distance.
random motion of the Earth’s atmosphere
Are you able to elaborate on what you mean by this at all please, or possibly suggest a direction to look in to find more about what this means and the implications?
Have you ever looked at something on the horizon and it’s all shimmery and wavy and won’t hold still? That’s because air (and moisture in the air) diffracts light. And the air is not still, either. When you’re looking an incredibly small object that’s extremely far away the effect is rather like trying to see through one of those pebble textured glass shower doors, except if it were moving and the object you were looking at were the size of a gnat. And also several miles past the door.
