this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
832 points (98.8% liked)

Science Memes

14276 readers
2538 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Someone did the math above.

https://old.lemmy.world/comment/16391357

So, a typical pupil is around 2 mm in diameter in bright conditions. With the Rayleigh limit that results in an angular resolution of 1.22 * 60010^-9 m / 210^-3 m = 3.66*10^-4 rad

At a distance of 5 x 3 mi = 15 mi = 24.1 km this corresponds to a point to point distance of

tan(a/2) = (d/2)/l

d = tan(a/2) * l * 2 = tan(3.66*10^-4) * 24100 * 2 = 8.8 m

So in conclusion, with regular, human-like eyes he could discern points that are at least 8.8 m apart in the best case scenario. Discerning hair color from the color of the clothes would need a much higher resolution, and the horsemen are probably not 10 m apart from each other either. And again, this is a theoretical limit, real-world resolution would probably be significantly lower.