[reaperducer]

then communications were cut off, and no more information was sent back.

Have any of these moon landings been done at night where people have been able to watch it happening through a telescope? Or are things so small at the moon's distance that there'd be nothing to see?

[trothamel]

It might be a stretch to call it a landing, but the LCROSS mission maneuvered a Centaur upper stage to a controlled crash on the moon. IIRC it was done at night so that telescopes on Earth could see it, but none actually did.

Actual landers tend to try to land during lunar day, to take advantage of the warmer temperatures and to have sunlight to recharge batteries.

[aurailious]

The resolution a 10 meter telescope on Earth can make out of the moon is about 22 meters per pixel. We can yet make out the moon landing site with earth based telescope.

[dmurray]

Making a 23 metre mark on the moon seems like a natural project for some country, then. Perhaps easier than orchestrating a soft landing.

There are lunar retroreflectors about a metre across [0] that are detectable with optical equipment, for some definition of optical. But to leave a mark that can be seen from earth - to leave your tag, or an X, or a crude drawing of a penis and testes - surely that's an urge as old as art itself.

[0]https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/...

[weaksauce]

Just watched the ted talk from the woman who came up with the algorithm to photograph the black hole and she had a slide of the best picture we can get of the moon from earth and she said each pixel on that picture could fit something like 600,000 oranges. don't think it's possible that we can see a spacecraft landing on the moon with what we have.