More Moon Madness
May. 17th, 2007 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheaSo.... I went home to see if I could REALLY gay up the moon or not.
I took the highest resolution photo of the moon I could find and scaled it based on the diameter of the moon so that 1 pixel = 1 kilometer. (The image was awesomely close to this nice ratio so it worked well)
Since the moon is a sphere, I thought putting my triangle as close to center would be a good idea and in a dark sea. Less craters/mountains, higher contrast.
The green arrow points to roughly where my triangle is. It's much too small to see at this resolution though. (~12km/px) In fact you can only barely make out the arrow.
BUT if you look just about the length of the arrow's head above the arrow in this full resolution image, you can see a lone pink dot.... (warning, roughly 3600x3600 pixels) Of course... That would be the entire area was solid pink and a square.
So let's be a little more realistic. I zoomed WAAAAAAAY in and made generous pink lines 1/3 of a meter (about a foot) wide. A doable size but still pretty darned large.
At 1000 times the magnification of big photo above (warning: 2000x2000 image), our triangle is actually pretty visible! Cool! I think you could actually see that at an observatory!
In fact: Even at a mere 10 times the magnification of that photo, cranking the saturation all the way up still reveals our mark!
So... If you had a strong telescope and knew exactly what to look for and where to look, you COULD see a 1km chalk triangle on the moon. Cool. :)
I took the highest resolution photo of the moon I could find and scaled it based on the diameter of the moon so that 1 pixel = 1 kilometer. (The image was awesomely close to this nice ratio so it worked well)
Since the moon is a sphere, I thought putting my triangle as close to center would be a good idea and in a dark sea. Less craters/mountains, higher contrast.
The green arrow points to roughly where my triangle is. It's much too small to see at this resolution though. (~12km/px) In fact you can only barely make out the arrow.
BUT if you look just about the length of the arrow's head above the arrow in this full resolution image, you can see a lone pink dot.... (warning, roughly 3600x3600 pixels) Of course... That would be the entire area was solid pink and a square.
So let's be a little more realistic. I zoomed WAAAAAAAY in and made generous pink lines 1/3 of a meter (about a foot) wide. A doable size but still pretty darned large.
At 1000 times the magnification of big photo above (warning: 2000x2000 image), our triangle is actually pretty visible! Cool! I think you could actually see that at an observatory!
 | And even at only 100x, if you look very very close, you can very faintly see it. |
 But at 50 times the resolution of that big picture, it's gone."> |  Or is it? If we turn the saturation way up. It suddenly leaps out! |
In fact: Even at a mere 10 times the magnification of that photo, cranking the saturation all the way up still reveals our mark!
So... If you had a strong telescope and knew exactly what to look for and where to look, you COULD see a 1km chalk triangle on the moon. Cool. :)
