“Space is dark. You just won't believe how deeply, blackly, mind-bogglingly dark it is. I mean, you may think it's dark in the depths of your soul, but that's just sparklers to space.”
Interesting as always, Scott. My kids have heard so many of your intros now that they sometimes run round the house shouting "Hello, it's Scott Manley here", in what they imagine is a Scottish accent!
@@lucasrem1870 Its hilarious cus the only country that got to the moon, used those units. Same country that invented half this internet infrastructure too.
Well, the fact that we found that rocket stage should give us some reassurance that we are seeing a whole lot of the objects that might potentially impact Kerbin
"Panstarrs is looking for space craft... Oops I mean asteroids". A slip of the tongue gives away Scott's knowledge of the true nature of Panstarrs, a secret earth defense project.
You mentioned how the light varies on orphaned booster stage (I think that is what I heard.) I was very surprised to learn that 1. Satellites tumble during their life in orbit, or at least many of them do, and 2. The military can actually determine (much of the time) what kind of satellite they are looking at based on the "fingerprint" of reflected light as they tumble. I learned this when I worked on the GEODSS tracking system, way back in the mid '80s. The system is still used today, and comprises 4 geographically separated locations on the surface of earth. Each site sports qty 2 40 inch diameter f2 folded reflector telescopes, plus one 15 inch wide field scope for quick scans, and performs multiple entire sky surveys (including the stars) each night. We had one entire setup in the back yard, and it was great being able to go into the telescope domes and control room after hours to see what the test operators were doing. They were looking for satellites that were not supposed to be there, but I read that it is now also time shared to look for near earth crossing objects. Roughly stated, the system is able to see objects as small as a basketball, as far out as geosynchronous orbit. It amazes me that we (USA) could do this more than 30 years ago. I guess that I waxed a bit off topic, but my point is that yeah, a great deal can be learned from an object's light reflection pattern.
I swear, every time Scott does the Intro his voice gets slightly Deeper. In a few years we’ll need infrasound microphones in order to detect his voice.
Scott: "They wanted to make sure that the place that they thought it was, was the place that it actually was." "The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where isn't from where it is, whichever is greater, it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from where it is, to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position that it is, is now the that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't. In the event that the position that it is in, is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation. The variation being the difference between where the missile is, and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was. The missile guidance computer senario works as follows; because the variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, it is not just sure of where it is, but however it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice versa, and by differentiation this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and it's variation, which is called error."
"It's amazing that we can see these old objects in space" - Actually, this is a quite young space object, compared to all the other objects we see out there.
The optical interferometer CHARA has units spaced 330 meters apart, which gives it a resolution of half a meter (if you were to ignore the atmosphere).
Scot talks about the sample return capsule landing in Australia, and just a week or so ago I watched the DVD of the 1971 film, *THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN.* 😊
Another book on Scott's bookshelf is a James Corey sf novel, which I'm reading, based on that recommendation - also explores the alien-seed theme, and does it well.
@@Allan_aka_RocKITEman I can just remember watching (mostly from hiding behind the sofa) 'Quatermass and the Pit,' serialised in blurry black-and-white. It must have been about 1959-1960. I wonder how well that would work these days.
I often have to mention to people that we would need a 100m diameter UV (200nm) telescope, ideally in LEO to see details on the Moon at a resolution of 1m/px and that the largest telescope that's in operation right now is 10.4m. It rarely does anything. I even had people question the basic optics formulas I used for these calculations saying that they would trust them if I would've derived them myself. Some people are just too far gone. I also had an unpleasant discussion with someone that refuted all evidence about Moon landings and space flight in general because "nobody ever landed a [manned] rocket on Earth" - and of course no amount of argumentation, proof or physics calculations were able to convince him that it's actually easier to land a small lander on the Moon than it is to land a whole rocket vertically on Earth.
This is why I always design my KSP rockets so that every booster either falls back to Kerbin or smashes into my destination. You may ask "But isn't that expensive?" and my answer is "Shut up I'm playing sandbox only anyway."
every radio engineer knows this as path loss and noise floor, size doesn't matter, it's the number of photons you get as a function of brightness (system gain), and path loss (distance) and noise floor (background 'brightness').
It's weird how technology works. Cameras need light to work. Why are there stupid people that don't understand this simple fact? Go learn how cameras work and you'll understand this video a little bit better. I liked this video. This was a good video. Keep up the good work.
The black field white spot, white field black spot problem vs resolution is also relevant to SLA 3D printing when polymerizing small positive or negative features. Great explanation
Need to watch John Lenard Walson to see some really close ups of the moon, for an amateur astronomer. It’s unbelievable. Some of the craft he is capturing in space are mind blowing.
This is a very clever description. Another effect that is taking place is diffraction. Caused by the edge of the optics (your pupil, or the optical tube of a telescope) a star would only be about the diameter of an electron. Visualize the angular diameter of 100,000km diameter viewed from 5 light years away. Diffraction leads to the Airy rings that bloat the image of a star so that it covers multiple pixels. Each point on the moon does the same and all of the Airy rings overlap, so the sub-pixel image of the lander is washed out in all of the other detail. This is what leads to the definition of the diffraction limit of a telescope and is many times the size of an Apollo lander even for the size of the Hubble telescope. We are all amazed at the Hubble images of a thousand galaxies and imagine we are seeing lots of detail, but on that image, Hubble’s diffraction limit is around 10,000 light years. That is, we can’t see the detail of anything smaller than 10,000 light years in diameter.
Only one sport has ever been played on the moon. A game of golf on the moon was recorded in 1971. Alan Shepard hit a golf ball on the surface of the moon. Wanted to share some useless info :)
You can see a point source of light regardless of how small it is. Resolution is your ability to distinguish between two point sources next to each other. It’s amazing how many flat earthers don’t realize that
Its a shame we can't use that space debris to build space stuff it costs a lot to get it up there.. space recycling would be a cool emerging market. Also the image of the return capsule in the desert reminded me of this old movie the Andromeda strain. Lol
The amazing thing is that we can still see where the U.S. Flags were planted on the surface using sufficiently powerful telescopes, the down side is that from the decades of completely unshilelded solar radiation exposure, the dyes used to color the fabric red and blue have all but certainly faded leaving the flags bleached white... So the way the flags currently look would make it will appear as if France was there and had already surrendered.
Ah thanks, I only knew of the French channel and watched all the videos with subtitles. His latest video is not on the English channel though, so maybe he has already given up on it...
@@max_kl he is currently working on two big projects : Techniques Aéronautiques and a documentary about the Soviet lunar rocket N1. His English channel is probably not his highest priority now (but I think he wants to make his N1 movie available in English)
I’m slightly gutted by this. I did my astronomy badge when I was a kid, which gave me my life long love of space stuff. But back then, the leader that did the badge took us to an observatory nearby, and we were told the little thing we were looking at on the moon is the Apollo lander.... clearly BS I’ve just discovered ;-(. Every day is a school day! Great content Scott, thank you!
US Americans don't speak Imperial. They speak US Customary (as well as French Metric which Congress accepted as a standard in the 1850s). 16 oz in a pint. 128oz gallons. US ounces too are different (bigger) than Imperial. The US Congress adopted a standard decades before the Imperial Council met in the old kingdom's Commonwealth to finally build their standard for their colonial oppressions...i mean posessions. If you're going to be a little turd, then get your shite right.
@@STho205 Vive *la* France. And appart from niche use of nautical miles we really only use metric, unless you have a specific example in mind. Even our pint is metric, being half of a litre.
@@Релёкс84 you use fonts. 72 points of a French inch. Time is also not metric, nor is common radian geometry. Napoleon tried metric time and the people rejected it. Jefferson proposed a metric complex new measure based on the foot cut into 10 inches, etc when he was Sec of State 1788-1792. Congress rejected that as a pedantic exercise of no use, but they did coin metric money, over a century before European and Asian nations. Congress just standardized on the most common classical measures, based on 2,4,8,16 since they were designed by the ancients as market measures. Imperial later chose a independently different standard on volume that was half metric 20oz pints and 160oz gals as well as mils of inches. French Metric was designed as a naturalist/scientist measure. The new Republic had to pick something since every province had different market measure systems. It was as good as any, but in 1795 most people did not think or work in tens or decimal math, as that was novel. Customary is best for splitting up bulk items evenly since it is based on 2,4,8,16... F and C are both developed by naturalists and on a 100 scale. C being 0 to 100 for freezing/boiling water. F being 0 to 100 for the scale of animal health and survivablity. 50 being the moderate temp (Spring/Fall) for Europe at time. I, in the US, use both systems based on which is better for the task. In the 70s we learned both and the US is officially bi-measure as Canada is bilingual. Use as you like. If not in the US then the advice might be, When in Rome as a hallmark of courtesy. France always seemed a girl to me, thus *le* as a purposeful jab. Long live Wellington.
A good example for what you are describing are satellites which are visibile with the naked eye (at night): They are some 5 meters accross but you can see them with the naked eye from a few hundred kilometers away. But if you were standing on a mountain and could see a few hundred km far, there would be no chance you could spot a 5m large object on another mountain this far away.
I love these kinds of videos. Any chance you can do a video about weird anomalies / pictures / videos from official resources, like the Black Knight satellite and other live feed situations?
I am new to having a telescope, but I was thrilled that my family was able to see the rings of Saturn with the telescope I purchased at a garage sale! I was wondering why we could see Saturn and its rings, but we couldn't see anything with my telescope of spacecraft on the moon! Now it all makes sense. I will let my family know. Thank you!
There is many an astronomer that had their passion ignited from a childhood view of Saturn through a telescope. There is no nothing like seeing it for real, is there?!?! I'm glad to hear you and your family had such a positive experience. It's also a good sign that you and your telescope are a good match if you can make it do what you want it to do. This isn't always the case with a first scope. Enjoy!
The reappearing Centaur stage reminds me of how we used to treat the oceans like an infinite toxic waste sink some 70 years ago, and how we are now baffled by the ignorance of our grandparents. That is what our grandchildren, living in the true space age, will think of us.
Hey Bob, I'm looking at what Jack was talking about and it's definitely not a particle that's nearby. It is a bright object and it's obviously rotating because it's flashing, it's way out in the distance, certainly rotating in a very rhythmic fashion because the flashes come around almost on time. As we look back at the Earth it's up at about 11 o'clock, about maybe ten or twelve Earth-diameters. I don't know whether that does you any good, but there's something out there.
3:15 When you said "against a dark background" I immediately started looking for the book of the same name by Ian M Banks on your bookshelf and sadly I could not find it.
When I read the thumbnail I came here expecting to find posts from nay sayers claiming "Its because we've nev..." Nope Im not even going to say it.. I am very happy to say I was pleasantly surprised. Scott Manley, home of universal enlightenment 👍
The actual radial diameter of the moon is ~11500 arcseconds. I assumed that the outcome of arctan was parts/full circle, with full circle=1. Of course, one full circle=2π, and of course, as a software engineer with ten times my experience and intelligence, Scott was right all along. Calculate safe!
My guess would be protection from potential radiation exposure... maybe? Also: holding it like a box of newborn kittens because you don't want to be the guy that drops that after everything it's been through and for.
@Alain Martel has it partly right in that you do have to treat it with as much care as a bomb. @Suricata Kat was wrong. It's not because it's radioactive. Here's what I've heard is the reason for the suit: The reason the dude is wearing a "bomb disposal suit" (properly called an Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) suit) is that the capsule uses pyrotechnics to do many things, like detaching the backshell of the capsule, and deploying the parachute(s). If any of those pyrotechnics didn't go off for some reason, that means that that whole sample return capsule must be treated as if it was a live pyrotechnic device, and an EOD suit is a suitable (pun intended) way to handle such things. Right when you walk up to the thing you don't know if all the pyrotechnic devices went off or not, so the first person to go close to the thing has to be in a EOD suit. TL:DR The guy's in an EOD suit because the sample return capsule has handling requirements that almost exactly line up with the handling requirements of unexploded/dud ordinance (UXO).
@@michaeltaylors2456 you never heard of the protocols dealing with devices that have or HAD explosive substances in them ? You also think that hundreds of millions of dollars mission does this thing just for kicks,yes ? Do you have some better research that would make such protocols obsolete ? Idiot. Have some respect.
I thought this may be of some interest.When you take a photo of a star in the night sky then increase the photos brightness, you see more stars. I tried the opposite with a daylight photo of the moon, I darkend the photo to reveal a very bright light on the edge of the moon.
1.170.000 follower's... Never ever heard him ask to give his video a "thumbs up" or ask to subscribe 😀. Even "brilliant" or "surfshark VPN" never get mentioned in his videos 😉
Prediction: the moon is too bright which makes it exponentially more difficult to see a small object compared to if it were in the dark of space. EDIT: not correct but in the right direction!
It's like why, say, search and rescue can see your beacon light from kilometers away (provided it's powerful enough) - its lamp is less than an inch in size, but from that distance and at that ambient light (at night) it looks as if a huge ball of light (many meters wide) existed at your location. Rescuers' eyes collect the extra photons and they overload the adjacent rods in the retina (or pixels in a camera), so the light is now visible, even though it's miniscule in angular size! Like, if it was real-size in your eye, it would be a tiny fraction of one of eye's "pixels". Just like distant streetlights or floodlights at night.
The smallest features I can see on the moon are the group of little craters on the floor of Plato, each about 2 km across. This is limited more by the atmosphere than by optics. I'd need at least 10,000 times better resolution to tell the difference between a rock and Apollo hardware.
Remember when the Space Shuttle experimented with long tethers? I was able to see the tethers faintly with the naked eye even though they had to be pretty thin.
Love the shirt! If not for COVID layoff, I’d pick one up and add it to my Outlander/Game of Thrones/Breaking Bad/SpaceX/Lord of the Rings/Walking Dead/Angry Astronaut collection. Thanx again and fly safe, Scott. 👍
„[…] amazing that we can see these old objects in space!“-I think most objects we can see in space are _a lot_ older than those! They are incredibly young in comparison… 😄
Two of them are single quotes (one an open quote and one a closing quote), the other two are apostrophes. They are just represented by the same symbol in that font (bad).
I'm wracking my brain trying to remember which astronomer was saying that his favorite modern ginormous telescope could - in theory - resolve such objects on the moon, and future in-progress telescopes would be able to do it with ease - in theory - except they'd have to build special instruments to do it, and just the time cost on the instruments means that no one with the access will ever waste that very expensive scope time trying it.
You provide an excellent description of the difference between resolving and detecting an object. I would say your presentation also applies to darkfield microscopy. I think it is interesting how these concepts can apply to the very near and small objects as well as the astronomically far objects.
With the information they have now (the mission records of the launch and then the recent observations) they should be able to calculate its entire orbit from launch to present. IT's just a matter of doing the math now that there are reference points to check your answers.
Even without the calculations, you can take a pretty good guess as to where it went. It was designed to boost a spacecraft to the Moon from Earth. The distance between these is several orders of magnitude less than the distance from Earth to any other notable space object (Lagrange points could be interesting to visit, but aren't objects). So unless it was 100x overdesigned I suppose it would just have coasted around on an eccentric orbit in near-Earth space.
@@jakedee4117 I'm not qualified to say! But I think if the Earth-Moon and Earth-Sun points do have stuff in them it's much more likely to be dust and asteroid debris than our own space junk. Or curious but not very subtle aliens? We have our own probes in at least one of the Earth-Sun Lagrange points.
It's a very interesting subject. I had noticed that a few months ago. My retinae definitely haven't got the resolution to be able to see a two-metre sized object placed at a distance of a couple hundred kms. But in the cold and dry winter nights, I can perfectly see the bright light emitted by the two-metre sized light/projector of a light-house at two hundred and seven kms in Mallorca island, from a beach here in Barcelona. Also, I could perfectly see the Crew Dragon spacecraft when it flew directly over Barcelona on May this year. It must have been between 100 and 300 kms above our heads, and I can tell you the white sunlight it reflected was very, very strong. It was impossible not to see. That spacecraft is just eight metres long. I shouldn't be able to see anything that size at hundreds of kms of distance. But I am not seeing "the thing", but its light. Actually, the same happens with stars. We can see the light emitted by stars that are incredibly far from us, so far that it should be impossible to see those objects. But yes, in the end we are seeing the intense light they emit, not the stars.
I always have to laugh when flat earthers come up with these analogies about not being able to see a car in Houston from Dallas (apart from the earth's curve making this impossible), but yet you can see a satellite of the same size from the same distance.. They just don't understand that you're not seeing the satellite, you're seeing the light that is reflecting of it on a black background. And the brighter the light is, the bigger it looks. Even the Sputnik, which was just a 58 cm ball, could clearly be seen from earth because it so reflective. I bet a lot of people also think that some stars they see are bigger than others, when in fact they all are so far away that they are effectively point sources, they just have different brightness which make them appear to have different sizes.
Very interesting. Any optical instrument performance, and therefore of telescopes, are diffraction-limited. This means that photons coming from the spacecraft and the nearby surface of the moon, are indistinguishable
8:40 That's not entirely correct. I thought so too at first, but it turns out that the capture was not due to a gravity assist by the Moon. You can confirm this by doing a computer simulation with the Moon completely removed from the system. 2020 SO would still have been captured in essentially the same way. What actually caused the capture were its interactions with the L1 and L2 Lagrange points.
Another interesting fact related to the moon's brightness is that the best time to view or image the moon is not at full moon but to view at the less than 100% illuminated phases along the terminator which is the line between the lunar day and the lunar night. Lunar features are less brightly illuminated at the terminator and therefore do not looked washed out when viewed/ imaged.
Basically comes down to contrast. You can’t just take a good picture of a small reflective object when it is superimposed on to an even bigger reflective object
This might be off topic but I thought scott was a lot younger till I saw his hair grown out. His voice and spirit are young for sure though. And hes the elder statesman of TH-cam aerospace videos as far as I'm concerned.
It's just fascinating to think that in thousands of years a highly advanced human civilisation will probably recover some of these boosters and put them in a museum for early human spaceflight. In just the same way we preserve stone age tools and such now.
I did the back-of-envelope math once to figure out how big of a mirror you'd need to image an Apollo decent stage from earth and it was comedically massive - a couple hundred meters if you wanted a few "pixels" of lander. I wanted to try to set up an optical long baseline thing like at Mt. Wilson but it would have been WAAAY to expensive to buy at least three "nice" telescopes and a bunch of mirrors and quite painful to align them and get them pointed at a target as small as an Apollo landing site. like how would you slew?
Hey Scott, love the channel. You are the best! I religiously watch your Space Explanation uploads. Been watching since the early Kerbal days. I wanted to offer a pronunciation guide for the Israeli moon lander. The emphasis should be on the final syllable. So Beresheet would be pronounced: beh-ray-SHEET. Keep up the good work!
your t-shirt is insulting, luckily your show actually contains good information, a good change from other want to be . keep up the great work. loving it
Put more simply: to telescopically detect an object in deep space, you merely need to collect enough photons from it (reflected or emitted) to create sufficient contrast against the blackness of space. Image resolution is irrelevant. To image an object on the surface of another world, you need sufficient resolution to differentiate the object from its background, and all Earth-based (or orbiting) telescopes currently lack sufficient resolution to do that.
Hello Scott. Thanks for this video and all your others. I’ve been tuning in for years. When I was a kid I learned how space is dark, which you mentioned in this video. My question is; the sun lights up our planet earth, so why doesn’t the suns light show up in space? What causes the suns light to only show up when it hits our atmosphere? Hopefully there is an answer for this question.
Don Nebes@ the suns light does show up in space..except you are not there to see it...we can only see sunlight directly in our eye or if it is reflected off an object such as the moon...
@@zeendaniels5809 I think Plasmaburndeath was referring to wanting better resolution than the LRO hence wanting a Hubble like telescope in lunar orbit.
There's a big difference between detecting something with an imaging system and resolving details of that object with that same imaging system, and that's key in this discussion. Resolving details is not only a function of aperture size (main mirror size for a telescope) but also of contrast, and this means that imaging systems can be limited by the contrast of the light hitting the camera sensor. For example, resolution for consumer lenses is quite often measured at 10 or 20% contrast. I think Scott Manley describes the issue with contrast without perhaps saying so. We can detect a lot of things that are much smaller than the angular resolution defined by the Rayleigh Criterion, but we can't resolve the details of those objects. Much of what telescopes are used for is detection, not resolving details. A boss/advisor in grad school was able to calculate that with a consumer-grade lens (300mm I think), a dinner plate could be detected as it transitted across the Sun in a 400 mile high Earth orbit (my memory might be fuzzy on the details). The keyword there is "detected". You'd be able to say something was there but not what that something was.......unless you had previous information about a dinner plate put into a 400-mile orbit!
Well, space archeology is officially a thing now...
Sparcheology.
Thants.
Exoarchaeology.
So you can be a Jedi and Indiana Jones at the same time
@@starty8814 So... Spock without the force?
“Space is dark. You just won't believe how deeply, blackly, mind-bogglingly dark it is. I mean, you may think it's dark in the depths of your soul, but that's just sparklers to space.”
Nice reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
underrated
Great comment. I give it a score of 42.
@@rmvdhaak 0
@@equation1321 Do you know the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything?
08:24 I repeat, there is no Top Secret Alien Spacecraft Monitoring project in Hawaii.
hmmmmmm
you say that cause it's Top Secret, obviously you wouldn't know about it
Of course not. Its located in Bonn, Germany. They needed to put the old government buildings to some use when they moved to Berlin
There is no Very Large Space Monitoring Radar in Puerto Rico.
@@Kineth1 sad but alas now true
1969: Phone line on the moon.
2019: Sorry sir, your data rates are that high because you live in a rural village.
Interesting as always, Scott. My kids have heard so many of your intros now that they sometimes run round the house shouting "Hello, it's Scott Manley here", in what they imagine is a Scottish accent!
This is awesome 😂😂
funny guy, inches, miles.....
mad non science people!
@@lucasrem1870 Its hilarious cus the only country that got to the moon, used those units.
Same country that invented half this internet infrastructure too.
(8:42) There's something poetic about how our trash is floating so far out into space from a previous mission, but Sol says "here, have it back".
"hey, you dropped something, is this yours?"
Well, the fact that we found that rocket stage should give us some reassurance that we are seeing a whole lot of the objects that might potentially impact Kerbin
We need the Blunderbirds to come and clean up Low Kerbin Orbit using their SSTO 'garbage trucks'!
@@InventorZahran SpaceX are working on it... 😉
"Panstarrs is looking for space craft... Oops I mean asteroids". A slip of the tongue gives away Scott's knowledge of the true nature of Panstarrs, a secret earth defense project.
The Council of funding Nations will be disappointed
Dang! I knew it!
I just wanted to comment how the number of likes is 42... - but two people liked it before I could even start typing.
I think the Defense Department's telescope that looks at others satellites is actually sitting next door to Panstarrs :-)
Nice plot for a holyood movie.
You mentioned how the light varies on orphaned booster stage (I think that is what I heard.)
I was very surprised to learn that 1. Satellites tumble during their life in orbit, or at least many of them do, and 2. The military can actually determine (much of the time) what kind of satellite they are looking at based on the "fingerprint" of reflected light as they tumble.
I learned this when I worked on the GEODSS tracking system, way back in the mid '80s. The system is still used today, and comprises 4 geographically separated locations on the surface of earth. Each site sports qty 2 40 inch diameter f2 folded reflector telescopes, plus one 15 inch wide field scope for quick scans, and performs multiple entire sky surveys (including the stars) each night. We had one entire setup in the back yard, and it was great being able to go into the telescope domes and control room after hours to see what the test operators were doing.
They were looking for satellites that were not supposed to be there, but I read that it is now also time shared to look for near earth crossing objects. Roughly stated, the system is able to see objects as small as a basketball, as far out as geosynchronous orbit. It amazes me that we (USA) could do this more than 30 years ago.
I guess that I waxed a bit off topic, but my point is that yeah, a great deal can be learned from an object's light reflection pattern.
I swear, every time Scott does the Intro his voice gets slightly Deeper. In a few years we’ll need infrasound microphones in order to detect his voice.
He's getting Manlier and Manlier with each video
Eventually, videos will just start with a seismograph reading.
I always find myself mimicking 'Hullo it's Scott Manley here', everytime before his video starts. I can't help myself and it's a tad worrying.
@@bluemountain4181 every video, he’s getting scott _manlier_
I’ll leave
That's another consequence of the expansion of the Universe.
Scott: "They wanted to make sure that the place that they thought it was, was the place that it actually was."
"The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where isn't from where it is, whichever is greater, it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from where it is, to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position that it is, is now the that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't. In the event that the position that it is in, is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation. The variation being the difference between where the missile is, and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was. The missile guidance computer senario works as follows; because the variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, it is not just sure of where it is, but however it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice versa, and by differentiation this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and it's variation, which is called error."
Ouch! My head aches.
Thing is, if you listen to it enough, it starts to make sense. 🤷🏻♀️
@@LexieAssassin
That's what I am afraid of. ... ...
"It's amazing that we can see these old objects in space" - Actually, this is a quite young space object, compared to all the other objects we see out there.
Unfortunately you lost the flat earthers and lunatics at 'think' 😂
No, I'm still here. I don't get it 🙁
😉😂🤣
I hope these replies are sarcastic
@@HDTomo I hope so haha
Scott is wearing that shirt for a reason.
That's fine.
The optical interferometer CHARA has units spaced 330 meters apart, which gives it a resolution of half a meter (if you were to ignore the atmosphere).
I tried to ignore the atmosphere, but I passed out.
Scot talks about the sample return capsule landing in Australia, and just a week or so ago I watched the DVD of the 1971 film, *THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN.* 😊
tThis will be the beta strain...
They thought covid was something to worry about!
@john smith >>> I have never watched the TV movie, but from what I have heard most people say about it I agree.
that is an all-time classic
Another book on Scott's bookshelf is a James Corey sf novel, which I'm reading, based on that recommendation - also explores the alien-seed theme, and does it well.
@@Allan_aka_RocKITEman I can just remember watching (mostly from hiding behind the sofa) 'Quatermass and the Pit,' serialised in blurry black-and-white. It must have been about 1959-1960. I wonder how well that would work these days.
But if I get my binoculars out on a clear night, I swear I can see a 6 foot tall metallic monolith on the moon!
18ft!
Take this like and never speak of those things again.
It's just a weather baloon.
I can see a teacher that works in my school (Harry Herpson High School) on the moon. Its blurry but its definitely him
@@websitesthatneedanem
It’s a small one, that’s all they could fit in the Tesla.
this is the first time I've seen pictures of the Hyabusa capsule retrieval. Reminds me of the Andromeda Strain! As always a fascinating video.
"Sir; There's a fire".
I often have to mention to people that we would need a 100m diameter UV (200nm) telescope, ideally in LEO to see details on the Moon at a resolution of 1m/px and that the largest telescope that's in operation right now is 10.4m.
It rarely does anything. I even had people question the basic optics formulas I used for these calculations saying that they would trust them if I would've derived them myself. Some people are just too far gone.
I also had an unpleasant discussion with someone that refuted all evidence about Moon landings and space flight in general because "nobody ever landed a [manned] rocket on Earth" - and of course no amount of argumentation, proof or physics calculations were able to convince him that it's actually easier to land a small lander on the Moon than it is to land a whole rocket vertically on Earth.
This is why I always design my KSP rockets so that every booster either falls back to Kerbin or smashes into my destination.
You may ask "But isn't that expensive?" and my answer is "Shut up I'm playing sandbox only anyway."
Curious Droid also did a good video on this too.
Also ... too:
SYNTAX ERROR. REDO FROM START.
Looks in telescope: Ahh, there's my keys..
It's comforting to know there are people out there who understand this science voodoo like space and planets and rockets.
"Blacker than the blackest black times infinity." -- Nathan Explosion
"Darker'n a black steer's tuckus on a moonless prairie night." - the cowboy from The Big Lebowski
every radio engineer knows this as path loss and noise floor, size doesn't matter, it's the number of photons you get as a function of brightness (system gain), and path loss (distance) and noise floor (background 'brightness').
It's weird how technology works. Cameras need light to work. Why are there stupid people that don't understand this simple fact? Go learn how cameras work and you'll understand this video a little bit better. I liked this video. This was a good video. Keep up the good work.
The black field white spot, white field black spot problem vs resolution is also relevant to SLA 3D printing when polymerizing small positive or negative features. Great explanation
Curious Droid did a great video on this as well. Nicely done to the both of you.
Need to watch John Lenard Walson to see some really close ups of the moon, for an amateur astronomer. It’s unbelievable. Some of the craft he is capturing in space are mind blowing.
This is a very clever description. Another effect that is taking place is diffraction. Caused by the edge of the optics (your pupil, or the optical tube of a telescope) a star would only be about the diameter of an electron. Visualize the angular diameter of 100,000km diameter viewed from 5 light years away. Diffraction leads to the Airy rings that bloat the image of a star so that it covers multiple pixels. Each point on the moon does the same and all of the Airy rings overlap, so the sub-pixel image of the lander is washed out in all of the other detail. This is what leads to the definition of the diffraction limit of a telescope and is many times the size of an Apollo lander even for the size of the Hubble telescope. We are all amazed at the Hubble images of a thousand galaxies and imagine we are seeing lots of detail, but on that image, Hubble’s diffraction limit is around 10,000 light years. That is, we can’t see the detail of anything smaller than 10,000 light years in diameter.
Only one sport has ever been played on the moon.
A game of golf on the moon was recorded in 1971. Alan Shepard hit a golf ball on the surface of the moon.
Wanted to share some useless info :)
His buddy threw the Javelin.
@@scottmanley could you hit a ball into lunar orbit?
@@paulhaynes8045 not from here.
Maybe with a 9 iron?
You can only do it once because you gotta ditch the space suit.
No.
In fact I don’t believe there are any firearms that have the muzzle velocity to reach lunar orbit.
You can see a point source of light regardless of how small it is. Resolution is your ability to distinguish between two point sources next to each other. It’s amazing how many flat earthers don’t realize that
Its a shame we can't use that space debris to build space stuff it costs a lot to get it up there.. space recycling would be a cool emerging market. Also the image of the return capsule in the desert reminded me of this old movie the Andromeda strain. Lol
"the damn fool opened it!"
The amazing thing is that we can still see where the U.S. Flags were planted on the surface using sufficiently powerful telescopes, the down side is that from the decades of completely unshilelded solar radiation exposure, the dyes used to color the fabric red and blue have all but certainly faded leaving the flags bleached white... So the way the flags currently look would make it will appear as if France was there and had already surrendered.
4:55 Techniques Spatiales has a fantastic YT channel (in French, and an other one in English : "French space guy")
Yes he does!
Salut les amis francais! :D
Ah thanks, I only knew of the French channel and watched all the videos with subtitles. His latest video is not on the English channel though, so maybe he has already given up on it...
Alex space French guy cooking?
@@max_kl he is currently working on two big projects : Techniques Aéronautiques and a documentary about the Soviet lunar rocket N1. His English channel is probably not his highest priority now (but I think he wants to make his N1 movie available in English)
I’m slightly gutted by this. I did my astronomy badge when I was a kid, which gave me my life long love of space stuff. But back then, the leader that did the badge took us to an observatory nearby, and we were told the little thing we were looking at on the moon is the Apollo lander.... clearly BS I’ve just discovered ;-(. Every day is a school day! Great content Scott, thank you!
I appreciate that he still says "for those who speak imperial" every damn time lmaoo
US Americans don't speak Imperial. They speak US Customary (as well as French Metric which Congress accepted as a standard in the 1850s). 16 oz in a pint. 128oz gallons. US ounces too are different (bigger) than Imperial. The US Congress adopted a standard decades before the Imperial Council met in the old kingdom's Commonwealth to finally build their standard for their colonial oppressions...i mean posessions. If you're going to be a little turd, then get your shite right.
@@STho205 then it is even worse than I imagined...Thanks for the info tho
@@martipg3866 vice le France. They still use medieval post Roman measures though, and so do you, ...probably without even realizing it.
@@STho205 Vive *la* France. And appart from niche use of nautical miles we really only use metric, unless you have a specific example in mind. Even our pint is metric, being half of a litre.
@@Релёкс84 you use fonts. 72 points of a French inch. Time is also not metric, nor is common radian geometry. Napoleon tried metric time and the people rejected it. Jefferson proposed a metric complex new measure based on the foot cut into 10 inches, etc when he was Sec of State 1788-1792. Congress rejected that as a pedantic exercise of no use, but they did coin metric money, over a century before European and Asian nations. Congress just standardized on the most common classical measures, based on 2,4,8,16 since they were designed by the ancients as market measures. Imperial later chose a independently different standard on volume that was half metric 20oz pints and 160oz gals as well as mils of inches.
French Metric was designed as a naturalist/scientist measure. The new Republic had to pick something since every province had different market measure systems. It was as good as any, but in 1795 most people did not think or work in tens or decimal math, as that was novel. Customary is best for splitting up bulk items evenly since it is based on 2,4,8,16...
F and C are both developed by naturalists and on a 100 scale. C being 0 to 100 for freezing/boiling water. F being 0 to 100 for the scale of animal health and survivablity. 50 being the moderate temp (Spring/Fall) for Europe at time.
I, in the US, use both systems based on which is better for the task. In the 70s we learned both and the US is officially bi-measure as Canada is bilingual. Use as you like. If not in the US then the advice might be, When in Rome as a hallmark of courtesy.
France always seemed a girl to me, thus *le* as a purposeful jab. Long live Wellington.
A good example for what you are describing are satellites which are visibile with the naked eye (at night): They are some 5 meters accross but you can see them with the naked eye from a few hundred kilometers away. But if you were standing on a mountain and could see a few hundred km far, there would be no chance you could spot a 5m large object on another mountain this far away.
I love these kinds of videos. Any chance you can do a video about weird anomalies / pictures / videos from official resources, like the Black Knight satellite and other live feed situations?
I am new to having a telescope, but I was thrilled that my family was able to see the rings of Saturn with the telescope I purchased at a garage sale! I was wondering why we could see Saturn and its rings, but we couldn't see anything with my telescope of spacecraft on the moon! Now it all makes sense. I will let my family know. Thank you!
There is many an astronomer that had their passion ignited from a childhood view of Saturn through a telescope. There is no nothing like seeing it for real, is there?!?! I'm glad to hear you and your family had such a positive experience. It's also a good sign that you and your telescope are a good match if you can make it do what you want it to do. This isn't always the case with a first scope. Enjoy!
8:23
Uh-huh, sure, asteroids. Riiiiiiiight...
The reappearing Centaur stage reminds me of how we used to treat the oceans like an infinite toxic waste sink some 70 years ago, and how we are now baffled by the ignorance of our grandparents.
That is what our grandchildren, living in the true space age, will think of us.
need a video that's just Scott saying "mirror"
Hey Bob, I'm looking at what Jack was talking about and it's definitely not a particle that's nearby. It is a bright object and it's obviously rotating because it's flashing, it's way out in the distance, certainly rotating in a very rhythmic fashion because the flashes come around almost on time. As we look back at the Earth it's up at about 11 o'clock, about maybe ten or twelve Earth-diameters. I don't know whether that does you any good, but there's something out there.
3:15 When you said "against a dark background" I immediately started looking for the book of the same name by Ian M Banks on your bookshelf and sadly I could not find it.
maybe if you put it up against a dark background you'd be able to spot it easier
Through A Bookshelf, Lightly...
When I read the thumbnail I came here expecting to find posts from nay sayers claiming "Its because we've nev..." Nope Im not even going to say it.. I am very happy to say I was pleasantly surprised. Scott Manley, home of universal enlightenment 👍
The actual radial diameter of the moon is ~11500 arcseconds.
I assumed that the outcome of arctan was parts/full circle, with full circle=1. Of course, one full circle=2π, and of course, as a software engineer with ten times my experience and intelligence, Scott was right all along.
Calculate safe!
why does the Japanese dude holding the capsule look like he's defusing a bomb?
Not a bomb, but need to be handled with as much, if not more, care than a bomb.
My guess would be protection from potential radiation exposure... maybe? Also: holding it like a box of newborn kittens because you don't want to be the guy that drops that after everything it's been through and for.
Actors doing their best to add gravitas to the scene
@Alain Martel has it partly right in that you do have to treat it with as much care as a bomb.
@Suricata Kat was wrong. It's not because it's radioactive.
Here's what I've heard is the reason for the suit:
The reason the dude is wearing a "bomb disposal suit" (properly called an Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) suit) is that the capsule uses pyrotechnics to do many things, like detaching the backshell of the capsule, and deploying the parachute(s).
If any of those pyrotechnics didn't go off for some reason, that means that that whole sample return capsule must be treated as if it was a live pyrotechnic device, and an EOD suit is a suitable (pun intended) way to handle such things. Right when you walk up to the thing you don't know if all the pyrotechnic devices went off or not, so the first person to go close to the thing has to be in a EOD suit.
TL:DR The guy's in an EOD suit because the sample return capsule has handling requirements that almost exactly line up with the handling requirements of unexploded/dud ordinance (UXO).
@@michaeltaylors2456 you never heard of the protocols dealing with devices that have or HAD explosive substances in them ? You also think that hundreds of millions of dollars mission does this thing just for kicks,yes ? Do you have some better research that would make such protocols obsolete ?
Idiot. Have some respect.
I thought this may be of some interest.When you take a photo of a star in the night sky then increase the photos brightness, you see more stars. I tried the opposite with a daylight photo of the moon, I darkend the photo to reveal a very bright light on the edge of the moon.
8:25 Sure. . . we believe you *X-Files plays*
1.170.000 follower's... Never ever heard him ask to give his video a "thumbs up" or ask to subscribe 😀. Even "brilliant" or "surfshark VPN" never get mentioned in his videos 😉
Come to think on it, I don't think Scott has ever been sponsored by anyone either ...
He does it for the fun of it and I'm certainly grateful !
Scott has a day job, so he can do this. Other youtubers sort of have to get sponsors or else they go bankrupt
Scott has been required viewing material for the star citizen crowd for years.
Thank you for all your hard work and knowledge you share! You are one incredible guy!
Prediction: the moon is too bright which makes it exponentially more difficult to see a small object compared to if it were in the dark of space.
EDIT: not correct but in the right direction!
I thought it was just because the moon won't hold still. Infuriating! 😉
It's like why, say, search and rescue can see your beacon light from kilometers away (provided it's powerful enough) - its lamp is less than an inch in size, but from that distance and at that ambient light (at night) it looks as if a huge ball of light (many meters wide) existed at your location. Rescuers' eyes collect the extra photons and they overload the adjacent rods in the retina (or pixels in a camera), so the light is now visible, even though it's miniscule in angular size! Like, if it was real-size in your eye, it would be a tiny fraction of one of eye's "pixels". Just like distant streetlights or floodlights at night.
The smallest features I can see on the moon are the group of little craters on the floor of Plato, each about 2 km across. This is limited more by the atmosphere than by optics. I'd need at least 10,000 times better resolution to tell the difference between a rock and Apollo hardware.
Laura Halliday
What is it u use, SLR, lenses?
That's why we need telescopes in orbit! Send Hubble to mars!
Remember when the Space Shuttle experimented with long tethers? I was able to see the tethers faintly with the naked eye even though they had to be pretty thin.
I saw tether also think it was 1994 - was a power experiment
Scott, thank you for pronouncing Chabot as “Shabo” instead “Chabut”!!!
Well, he lives close by
@@pauldzim yeah, I grew up nearby but I'd STILL hear people say "Chabut".
The laser mirrors left by Apollo are detectable by earth telescopes that are also used to blast them with a laser pulse
You should say on the upcoming flight of the sn9 "I'm Scott Manley here, flip safe" right?
I have a feeling sn10 will beat sn9 to the launchpad, sn9 tried to flip in the dressingroom! ;)
@@Bratfalken It's just overenthusiastic.
SN9 got cold feet!
Might be scared of heights?
That was the politest "fly safe" I've heard in a while.
I dunno, Bob the flat earther from down the pub says those shadows are just dust from firmament-moths that fly into the bulb.
You need a better caliber of drinking buddies.
@@scottmanley Scott! You're right. He's heading to the ice-wall in a motorised bathtub soon anyway.
For whatever reason, this was really interesting. Thanks!
I thought Earth's atmosphere also played a factor in seeing distant/small objects.
There's a wibbly wobbly thing involved there.
A Brit good point. there seems to be a lot of wobbly things going on
Yes it just makes your images fuzzy and the ‘pixels’ bigger
@@scottmanley there's also a bit of diffraction through the atmosphere, so positions are altered too outside of light travel tome
Shoot for the moon.
If you miss, decades later people will wonder what the heck that thing on a close approach orbit is.
8:24 "... looking for spacecraft ..." lmao, Scott confirms we're looking for alien spacecraft
Um. A probe sent by Earth is a spacecraft.
full on Freudian slip
Love the shirt! If not for COVID layoff, I’d pick one up and add it to my Outlander/Game of Thrones/Breaking Bad/SpaceX/Lord of the Rings/Walking Dead/Angry Astronaut collection.
Thanx again and fly safe, Scott. 👍
so TL;DW, just because you can see a pollen seed on a piece of black paper doesn't mean you can find a flour grain on a whiteboard.
8:24 slip of the tongue, or the start of the overton window shift? /s
more like a realignment. feels like it's been shifting - backwards - for quite some time.
Very helpful - thanks!!
„[…] amazing that we can see these old objects in space!“-I think most objects we can see in space are _a lot_ older than those! They are incredibly young in comparison… 😄
The 2.3m Lunokhod 1 was lost between September 14, 1971 and March 17, 2010 until it was imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
You have nested single quotes on a shirt. Should've used \'
Good catch.
Or backticks in JS
@@voyageruk2002 Unless the shirt does not support ES6 Template Literals ;)
Two of them are single quotes (one an open quote and one a closing quote), the other two are apostrophes. They are just represented by the same symbol in that font (bad).
I'm wracking my brain trying to remember which astronomer was saying that his favorite modern ginormous telescope could - in theory - resolve such objects on the moon, and future in-progress telescopes would be able to do it with ease - in theory - except they'd have to build special instruments to do it, and just the time cost on the instruments means that no one with the access will ever waste that very expensive scope time trying it.
You provide an excellent description of the difference between resolving and detecting an object. I would say your presentation also applies to darkfield microscopy. I think it is interesting how these concepts can apply to the very near and small objects as well as the astronomically far objects.
Do they know how far and where the Centaur stage went before returning to Earth over the 40 years? 🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️
With the information they have now (the mission records of the launch and then the recent observations) they should be able to calculate its entire orbit from launch to present. IT's just a matter of doing the math now that there are reference points to check your answers.
Even without the calculations, you can take a pretty good guess as to where it went. It was designed to boost a spacecraft to the Moon from Earth. The distance between these is several orders of magnitude less than the distance from Earth to any other notable space object (Lagrange points could be interesting to visit, but aren't objects). So unless it was 100x overdesigned I suppose it would just have coasted around on an eccentric orbit in near-Earth space.
@@yetanotherstronk Do you think there is interesting space junk stuck in the La grange points ?
@@jakedee4117 I'm not qualified to say! But I think if the Earth-Moon and Earth-Sun points do have stuff in them it's much more likely to be dust and asteroid debris than our own space junk. Or curious but not very subtle aliens? We have our own probes in at least one of the Earth-Sun Lagrange points.
It's a very interesting subject. I had noticed that a few months ago.
My retinae definitely haven't got the resolution to be able to see a two-metre sized object placed at a distance of a couple hundred kms. But in the cold and dry winter nights, I can perfectly see the bright light emitted by the two-metre sized light/projector of a light-house at two hundred and seven kms in Mallorca island, from a beach here in Barcelona.
Also, I could perfectly see the Crew Dragon spacecraft when it flew directly over Barcelona on May this year. It must have been between 100 and 300 kms above our heads, and I can tell you the white sunlight it reflected was very, very strong. It was impossible not to see. That spacecraft is just eight metres long. I shouldn't be able to see anything that size at hundreds of kms of distance. But I am not seeing "the thing", but its light.
Actually, the same happens with stars. We can see the light emitted by stars that are incredibly far from us, so far that it should be impossible to see those objects. But yes, in the end we are seeing the intense light they emit, not the stars.
TL;DR: Because the Moon is covered in rocks approximately the same size and brightness as small spacecraft.
I always have to laugh when flat earthers come up with these analogies about not being able to see a car in Houston from Dallas (apart from the earth's curve making this impossible), but yet you can see a satellite of the same size from the same distance.. They just don't understand that you're not seeing the satellite, you're seeing the light that is reflecting of it on a black background. And the brighter the light is, the bigger it looks. Even the Sputnik, which was just a 58 cm ball, could clearly be seen from earth because it so reflective. I bet a lot of people also think that some stars they see are bigger than others, when in fact they all are so far away that they are effectively point sources, they just have different brightness which make them appear to have different sizes.
Scott Manley mentioned Spinal Tap... my life is complete!
Very interesting. Any optical instrument performance, and therefore of telescopes, are diffraction-limited. This means that photons coming from the spacecraft and the nearby surface of the moon, are indistinguishable
8:40 That's not entirely correct. I thought so too at first, but it turns out that the capture was not due to a gravity assist by the Moon. You can confirm this by doing a computer simulation with the Moon completely removed from the system. 2020 SO would still have been captured in essentially the same way. What actually caused the capture were its interactions with the L1 and L2 Lagrange points.
Another interesting fact related to the moon's brightness is that the best time to view or image the moon is not at full moon but to view at the less than 100% illuminated phases along the terminator which is the line between the lunar day and the lunar night. Lunar features are less brightly illuminated at the terminator and therefore do not looked washed out when viewed/ imaged.
Loved Friday night at the Chabot Observatory!
'You probably thought this was a real tesla roadster - NOPE, Chuck Testa Roadster.'
Basically comes down to contrast. You can’t just take a good picture of a small reflective object when it is superimposed on to an even bigger reflective object
This might be off topic but I thought scott was a lot younger till I saw his hair grown out. His voice and spirit are young for sure though. And hes the elder statesman of TH-cam aerospace videos as far as I'm concerned.
Very cool. Thanks for the detailed information
It's just fascinating to think that in thousands of years a highly advanced human civilisation will probably recover some of these boosters and put them in a museum for early human spaceflight. In just the same way we preserve stone age tools and such now.
I did the back-of-envelope math once to figure out how big of a mirror you'd need to image an Apollo decent stage from earth and it was comedically massive - a couple hundred meters if you wanted a few "pixels" of lander. I wanted to try to set up an optical long baseline thing like at Mt. Wilson but it would have been WAAAY to expensive to buy at least three "nice" telescopes and a bunch of mirrors and quite painful to align them and get them pointed at a target as small as an Apollo landing site. like how would you slew?
Another amazing episode! How an earth (not on moon 😉) do you find all that footage? Great stuff, thanks!
Hey Scott, love the channel. You are the best! I religiously watch your Space Explanation uploads. Been watching since the early Kerbal days.
I wanted to offer a pronunciation guide for the Israeli moon lander. The emphasis should be on the final syllable. So Beresheet would be pronounced: beh-ray-SHEET.
Keep up the good work!
Worth it just for Scott pronouncing "mirror". Nice explanation thanks.
Scots, including we expats, generally speak English more clearly than the folk south of Scotland.
your t-shirt is insulting, luckily your show actually contains good information, a good change from other want to be . keep up the great work. loving it
Put more simply: to telescopically detect an object in deep space, you merely need to collect enough photons from it (reflected or emitted) to create sufficient contrast against the blackness of space. Image resolution is irrelevant. To image an object on the surface of another world, you need sufficient resolution to differentiate the object from its background, and all Earth-based (or orbiting) telescopes currently lack sufficient resolution to do that.
Hello Scott. Thanks for this video and all your others. I’ve been tuning in for years. When I was a kid I learned how space is dark, which you mentioned in this video. My question is; the sun lights up our planet earth, so why doesn’t the suns light show up in space? What causes the suns light to only show up when it hits our atmosphere? Hopefully there is an answer for this question.
Moon
Don Nebes@ the suns light does show up in space..except you are not there to see it...we can only see sunlight directly in our eye or if it is reflected off an object such as the moon...
Ok thanks for the reply’s.
Thanks Scott. Nice review. The photos of old Lunar Landing Sites were fantastic. Thanks for including them.
Excellent and informative video!
Love that you have Iain M Banks, Culture series in your bookshelf. Wonderful author and series.
So what You're saying Scott is we need to fund and deploy a Hubble clone In Orbit around the moon so we can see every little detail :-D
Not needed really. You know, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter 😉
@@zeendaniels5809 I think Plasmaburndeath was referring to wanting better resolution than the LRO hence wanting a Hubble like telescope in lunar orbit.
There's a big difference between detecting something with an imaging system and resolving details of that object with that same imaging system, and that's key in this discussion. Resolving details is not only a function of aperture size (main mirror size for a telescope) but also of contrast, and this means that imaging systems can be limited by the contrast of the light hitting the camera sensor. For example, resolution for consumer lenses is quite often measured at 10 or 20% contrast. I think Scott Manley describes the issue with contrast without perhaps saying so.
We can detect a lot of things that are much smaller than the angular resolution defined by the Rayleigh Criterion, but we can't resolve the details of those objects. Much of what telescopes are used for is detection, not resolving details. A boss/advisor in grad school was able to calculate that with a consumer-grade lens (300mm I think), a dinner plate could be detected as it transitted across the Sun in a 400 mile high Earth orbit (my memory might be fuzzy on the details). The keyword there is "detected". You'd be able to say something was there but not what that something was.......unless you had previous information about a dinner plate put into a 400-mile orbit!
TLDR; when looking at the moon, the SNR is too high to identify something small.
Too low.
Sooooo how big a mirror do we need on earth to "see" humans' leftovers on the moon with a reasonable resolution?