if so, could you please tell what kind of telescope I would need and the co-ordinates to view it please.thanks.Cryztal ~ from India.
No. Not even the Hubble Space Telescope can see the US flag on the moon.
No. The flag was less than a metre across, and the smallest object which can be seen by an Earth-based telescope is about the size of a football field. The flag may have deteriorated because of ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.
Even the most powerful telescopes (like Hubble) can't see anything on the moon smaller than a football field. We can see things that are very far away, but those things are very large. Stars are around a million miles across, galaxies are over a quadrillion miles across. Compare that to a 3 foot flag, and it explains the reason we can't see a flag on the moon. Also, the UV radiation on the moon is pretty intense, with no atmosphere to block it. The flag they used was a pretty cheap plastic, and would have been ruined by that UV fairly quickly.
No. No earth based telescope can resolve any object on the moon that small. There are photographs of the shadow cast by the lunar module on the moon though. Some of the American flags were blown over upon liftoff by the ascent module , but later Apollo missions planted the flag far enough away to prevent that from happening, All the flags are still there and will be for centuries if left undisturbed.
Hubble can't see it because it lacks the level of magnification needed to see such a small object from such a great distance. We simply don't have the technology to see the flag from the earth. The reasons we can see things that are far away are, A) They're much, much larger than the flag, and B) Those objects are usually light sources, or close enough to a light source to be illuminated. Many of the deep space images you see are of either nebula or galaxies, both of which are light years across, and give off light. The flag should still be there, although I'd imagine that it will have deteriorated quite a bit over the years. You gotta remember that it's been up there for nearly 40 years -- between the solar winds and radiation, small meteorites crashing on the lunar surface and the various dust and rocks on the moon, that flag isn't exactly in a hospitable environment. It's probably quite tattered and faded, if it hasn't been destroyed completely. The flag pole might be in better shape, albeit a bit worse for wear.
