I was reading an article about controversy over the US landing on the moon, regarding whether it happened or if it was just an elaborate hoax to beat the Ruskies.

I was wondering, shouldn't it be possible to train a high powered telescope on the landing sites from the missions? Assuming you could be accurate enough, or take enough time searching you should be able to locate the lower half of the landers and the other junk left behind (moon buggy for example).

I know this wouldn't offer irrefutable proof that the moon landings took place, but it would be a way for your average Joe to have some proof, and would be a pretty cool sight at the same time.

This might not be possible at all, because if it were, I would assume we would have seen pictures like this before...but I'm more curious as to why it wouldn't be possible, as it seems like you should be able to do this.

http://calgary.rasc.ca/moonscope.htm

It wasnt a hoax, get over it

I can't believe people are still debating about this.

Cool link, thanks! If you are curious, but don't want to follow the link, the short answer is that to see one of the lunar landers, you would need a telescope with 10x the resolution of our most powerful earth based telescope.

For the record I never said I thought it was a hoax...sorry if I gave the impression I was on that side of the argument (if you can call it an argument). Personally I find the evidence the doubters give in support of their argument to be absurd.

Why not point a telescope that is in space at the moon?

the link goes into that...the Hubble is designed to see large things that are far away, and to solve the resolution problem with a normal telescope you would need to be much much closer to the moon, so close in fact that it would be cheaper just to send another manned mission there to take pictures.

You've probably seen pictures of the earth from the moon. If you were on the moon, I doubt you'd be able to pinpoint your car with a telescope. It should be the same the other way around.

http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar

theres talk that one of the missions is to land at sites where the apollo landers are and take pictures of the landers.