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Comment by placebo | Hacker News Reader

At the risk of uncovering my ancientness, I remember reading astronomy books as a kid which specified that stars are so far away that they can't appear as anything more than dots of light even when viewed through the largest telescopes. Always makes me wonder what can be achieved in the future, especially since we're probably somewhere on an exponential progress curve. Of course, assuming a lot of optimism about not cutting off the branch we're sitting on before that happens...

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Regarding visible spectrum observations, I've been waiting to see if anyone can come up with a way to develop a consumer-accessible instrument that can sample a high enough resolution, to image all of the moon landing sites.

For as long as I can remember, the same thing has been said about the surface of the moon, which is the primary fuel for hoax narratives.

With all the buzz about high-resolution arrays being cobbled together from current-generation megapixel digital cameras, I'd love to see someone pull this off. It'd be pretty cool to know that for a budget of maybe tens of thousands of dollars, and some software skills, it'd be within the reach of hobbyists to snap some legit photos of the original moon landing artifacts as they exist.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but my understanding is the real issue isn't the sensor, it's the lens you put in front of it. You essentially have two ways to see smaller things from a fixed vantage point--put a longer focal length in front of the existing sensor, or put a higher resolution sensor behind the existing focal length lens. The problem is longer focal length gets big and expensive very quick, and existing lenses would limit the ability of a high resolution sensor. In many cases, high end professional camera with 36mp or higher sensors are hampered by the lenses that can't resolve that much detail.

Now, maybe in a few decades the CalTech lensless sensor will be commercially available and will work well enough that we won't have to worry about optics anymore, and it will all be silicon, but CalTech's sensor currently has something like 16 pixels total, so it has a long way to go.

> we won't have to worry about optics anymore

Right, if you have phase information you have a lot more options for (cheaply) making a synthetic aperture that's way bigger than your possible physical aperture.

Interesting read on the subject of capturing the lander sites: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/45-our-solar-syste...

The conspiracy theorists who think we never went to the moon are mostly unaware of the retroreflectors we left behind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment

I think you underestimate the creativity of conspiracy theorists to explain away any contradicting fact :)

I think it was in Cixin Liu's 'The Dark Forest' where there's a giant telescope at the edge of the solar system with twelve independently floating lenses focused and corrected by tiny thrusters...

What a terrible book. Naively written, leaves the impression that the author is more showing off that he can write about every sci-fi meme in existence ("I'm a big boy now, I know about that topic too!"). Unfocused, meandering plot. Nonsensical end. I regret wasting my time with it.

Hubble resolved this start to a disc 20 years ago.

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