Can you see moon landing with telescope

Just find the huge crater Copernicus , and place it at the bottom of your inverted field of view. To Copernicus' upper right you'll see the smaller crater Reinhold and beyond it the crater Lansberg. Apollo 12's landing site lies to the upper left of the 3. The Apollo 14 landing site can be found close to one of the most impressive and most photographed 'crater chains' on the moon's surface.

Once you have found craters Arzachel, Alphonsus, and Ptolemaeus, jump across to the right of Ptolemaeus, where you will find the smaller ring-like crater, Parry.

The Apollo 14 landing site is just to the lower right of this crater. The lunar module Falcon touched down in July in the most stunning location any Apollo mission visited—close to a meandering valley in the shadow of the Apennine mountains.

To find it, look for the break in the curve of the mountains, to the left of the crater Archimedes, past Autolycus and Aristillus. Apollo 15 landed above and to the left of these craters, in the foothills of the mountains.

The landing site of the Apollo 16 lunar module 'Orion' is probably the most challenging to find. If you place the crater Theophilus to the left of your eyepiece's field of view, you'll see a smaller, sharper-rimmed crater to its right. This is Kant, and Apollo 16 set down in the rugged highlands to its lower right.

The final Apollo mission in December saw the lunar module Challenger land in a notch-like 'bay' on the southern shore of the Sea of Serenity. To find it, put the shallow crater Posidonius at the bottom of your field of view.

Follow the shoreline 'up' past the semi-circular Le Monnier bay. Continue upwards and you'll find the Apollo 17 landing site. Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more!

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Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt with the American flag. Earth glows blue , miles in the distance. Six Apollo missions successfully landed on and departed from the Moon between July and December Top, clockwise: James Irwin salutes the flag at Hadley Rill; Harrison Schmitt collects rock samples in the Taurus-Littrow Valley; Buzz Aldrin's footprint in the lunar regolith; Charlie Duke placed a photo of his family on the Moon and took a picture of it; Edgar Mitchell photographs the desolate landscape of the Fra Mauro highlands; and Pete Conrad jiggles the Surveyor 3 probe to see how firmly it's situated.

The astronauts' tracks as well as the rover and other items are plainly visible. Click for a large version. All the landing sites can be found using these five prominent lunar craters. North is up in this view. In other words, even a football stadium on the Moon would look like a dot to Hubble. But those objects are far, far larger than the Moon.

So even if we built a colossal sports arena in Tycho crater, Hubble would barely see it at all. The landers, rovers, and other junk left on the lunar surface by the astronauts are totally invisible. However, there are two tricks we can use here. One is to look not for the artifacts themselves, but for their shadows. At sunrise or sunset, the shadow from a lander might be long enough to detect, even if the lander itself is invisible. However, this is a very tricky observation and has to be timed just right and the landscape itself may hide the shadow; crater rims, mountains, and natural dips and bumps might prevent sunlight from hitting the lander until the Sun is high in the sky, and that will shorten the shadows.

Plus, try to convince a committee in charge of hotly-contested and hugely over-subscribed telescopes to give you a night to try this and see how they react. Good luck ever getting an observation again. The other method is obvious enough: go back to the Moon and take a look. Later this year we will be sending the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to the Moon, and it will be able to resolve objects as small as 0.

It will easily resolve the landers, and even the rovers. Moon Hoax believers have made it their mission in life to deny the veritable tsunami of evidence that the landings were real. That includes all the pictures taken by the astronauts themselves. The only thing to do is to go back. Not to prove to Apollo deniers anything, of course. But the rest of us will look up, look out … and shoot the Moon.

Party hat image courtesy of Drew Saunders , via creative commons license. Register or Log In. The Magazine Shop. Login Register Stay Curious Subscribe.