Erik asks:

> I've wondered, can you use a telescope to see stuff we left behind (like
>  the rovers, and the decent stages of the LEMs)?

No, such items are far below the resolution limits of even lunar orbiting
spacecraft. The most recent orbiter, Clementine, a mapping mission, only had
a resolution such a pixel represented about a 125 meters on the surface, at
its very highest resolution. The LEM descent stages, the rovers, and by all
means the flags, would represent only a very small fraction of a single pixel
and thus be completely invisible.

However, that is not to say these items are not visible from lunar orbit. A
well-stabilized telescope looking down from orbit could be designed to
resolve items that small, but we don't build such spacecraft because they are
of little or no use. The value of an orbiting spacecraft lies in its synoptic
view, not in the extreme resolutions of very small areas of lunar terrain.

Nonetheless, that said, what is readily visible from the Earth as a remnant
of the Apollo missions are the corner-cube reflector arrays that were left
there as part of the Earth-Moon distancing measuring process that is still in
progress 30 years later.

A corner-cube is a reflector that is built just as its name sounds. Take a
internally mirrored cube and cut it along one of its diagonal planes. Now
orient it so that cross-sectional plane is more or less orthogonal to your
line of sight. The result is that when you shine a beam of light into the
cube, it will bounce around off of the remaining three sides in such a manner
that the light always comes back directly at you, regardless of actual
orientation (Go look at your car's taillights. You'll see that they too are
an array of corner cubes, and work in exactly the same manner).

Several of these corner-cube arrays were left on the Moon in order to conduct
a multi-decade analysis of the Moon's orbital loss due to tidal friction by
measuring the Earth-Moon distance to within a centimeter or two. The primary
instrument that has been involved in this continuous measurement is the
McDonald Observatory, in the Davis Mountains of far west Texas, not too far
from where I am.

For more information on the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiments, see:

     http://ilrs.gsfc.nasa.gov/lunar.html

     http://almagest.as.utexas.edu/~rlr/dda.html

Anyone with a sufficiently large enough pulsed laser and a good telescope can
probe these arrays, if they wish. With only a few tens of thousands of
dollars of equipment, you could do this off of your own roof. Your pulses
will sparkle like a jewel off of the surface of the Moon when your beam
finally strikes the arrays.

I watched just a portion of the Fox TV program last night. I must admit, I
really do get tired of all of the bullshit, misinformation, ready gullibility
and prideful ignorance of what seems to be the vast majority of the American
people.

One enlightened soul after another wrote items such as this on sci.astro this
morning:

"I watched that program too, and the reason why the questions can't be
answered is because the answer is that the trip to the moon was a lie.
The goverment is famous for it's dishonesty, so why should they change
now? There are way too many problems that got pointed out. Personally,
if we went doesn't matter as much as the fact that they lied, and people
probably lost their lives because of it. I think they wanted to show up
Russia, and prove they could get to the moon first. Well, they sure
fooled us!..."

In the immortal words of Lisa Simpson, "The FOX network has sunk to a new
low."

Wirt Atmar