[eps]

I remeber flipping through some spy tech book a while ago and one photo, allegedly quite famous, stuck with me - it was of a wrist watch on a hand of someone lying on a beach and while it was on a blurry side you could still tell what the time was. From the context it was taken in the 70s and from what I gathered it was a satellite snap.

Now thinking about it, it might've been a high-altitude plane (U2) photo instead, but I'm not sure.

Has anyone else seen this photo?

[anovikov]

I seen it, but it is a famous fake. A few centimeters is the lowest bound for resolution because of atmospheric distortion.

Also looking right from the top, at the best conditions, from 200km (a stable orbit can't be lower), will give 4cm resolution for a Hubble-like mirror, or 2cm per pixel Niquist frequency.

[dom0]

That really rather sounds like from within the atmosphere - heat shimmer alone should make this sort of resolution very difficult indeed from space.