Why haven't we been back to the moon?

[BlackCat]

Flubber, don't bother. The most secure evidence is that soviet didn't cry foul. They would have given up eastern europe if they could have proven that it was a scam.

[HalfLotus]

In that case we're past the "Can't afford it." and "No reason to." nonsense. The OP was right.

[BlackCat]

[KH mode]
No.
[/KH mode]

[Darius871]

In that case we're past the "Can't afford it." and "No reason to." nonsense. The OP was right.

Is this conceding defeat, or...? What's your response to the argument that the Soviets would have called foul, or the patently obvious problems KH raised?

I'm genuinely curious.

[KrazyHorse]

A decent amateur astronomer with a 6 inch reflector can easily track objects down to an arcminute or so. Below that you begin to talk about really precise measurements. Over a moment arm of, say, 5000 km the parallax on an object at 300000 km is ~0.95 degrees or 57 arcminutes. This means that two amateurs cooperating could easily have figured out the range to the apollo lunar module + command module to within a few thousand kilometers when they were all the way out at the moon.

Now, to check if they could have seen apollo:

the cross-sectional area of the two joined modules is ~100 m^2. The intensity of solar light at the earth's distance is ~1400 W/m^2. With an albedo of ~0.8 (much of the spacecraft was white/gold foil) the spacecraft would have been reflecting off ~110 000 W of sunlight. We will assume that this light was isometrically radiated (since the moon was about half full during Apollo 11, this is sufficient for our purposes). The sun emits about 4*10^26 W of power, at a distance of 1.5*10^8 km. At 300k km the apparent luminosity of Apollo was therefore (1.1*10^5)*(1.5*10^8)^2 / (4*10^26)*(3*10^5)^2 = 6.9*10^-17 that of the Sun's. By the retarded system of measurements astro people use, the sun from the earth is ~ -27 in apparent magnitude. Apollo would therefore have been a magnitude 13 star or so. According to this chart:

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/science/star-magnitude.htm

This is about the limit for visibility in an 8" telescope.

I only ever had a 6" reflector, but there are loads of people out there with far better than that.

[HalfLotus]

And despite all those fancy numbers, no one did. Darn.

[KrazyHorse]

Nobody observed apollo?





Dozens of people around the world observed multiple apollo missions telescopically basically all the way out to the moon.



Now, if you want to claim that Apollo 11-17 didn't actually land, and instead orbited like apollo 8 et al then it's much more difficult to disprove from direct observational evidence.

[KrazyHorse]

You ****ing ****.

[Boris Godunov]

[KH mode]
No.
[/KH mode]

I was going to say you forgot to call him a ****ing ****, but I see that's been covered.

[HalfLotus]

Dozens of people around the world observed multiple apollo missions telescopically basically all the way out to the moon.

Not true.

[KrazyHorse]

You're doing it wrong.

****.

[notyoueither]

Not true.

Oh, well then. Glad that this is settled.

[Boris Godunov]

http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/space/apollo.html

[Darius871]

A decent amateur astronomer with a 6 inch reflector can easily track objects down to an arcminute or so. Below that you begin to talk about really precise measurements. Over a moment arm of, say, 5000 km the parallax on an object at 300000 km is ~0.95 degrees or 57 arcminutes. This means that two amateurs cooperating could easily have figured out the range to the apollo lunar module + command module to within a few thousand kilometers when they were all the way out at the moon.

Now, to check if they could have seen apollo:

the cross-sectional area of the two joined modules is ~100 m^2. The intensity of solar light at the earth's distance is ~1400 W/m^2. With an albedo of ~0.8 (much of the spacecraft was white/gold foil) the spacecraft would have been reflecting off ~110 000 W of sunlight. We will assume that this light was isometrically radiated (since the moon was about half full during Apollo 11, this is sufficient for our purposes). The sun emits about 4*10^26 W of power, at a distance of 1.5*10^8 km. At 300k km the apparent luminosity of Apollo was therefore (1.1*10^5)*(1.5*10^8)^2 / (4*10^26)*(3*10^5)^2 = 6.9*10^-17 that of the Sun's. By the retarded system of measurements astro people use, the sun from the earth is ~ -27 in apparent magnitude. Apollo would therefore have been a magnitude 13 star or so. According to this chart:

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/science/star-magnitude.htm

This is about the limit for visibility in an 8" telescope.

I only ever had a 6" reflector, but there are loads of people out there with far better than that.

Uh, you're not exactly speaking HalfLotus' language here.

[Darius871]

http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/space/apollo.html

You're doing it wrong, Boris.

vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
>>>>>>>>>>>THIS HYPERLINK IS TO A WEBSITE DETAILING, WITH PHOTOGRAPHS, THE "TELESCOPIC TRACKING OF THE APOLLO LUNAR MISSIONS" THAT YOU CLAIM NEVER OCCURRED. PLEASE DO ACTUALLY CLICK ON IT AND ACTUALLY READ THE WORDS THAT IT REVEALS TO YOU. THANKS.<<<<<<<<<<<
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