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Paint The Moon... In Your Imagination
from the it-sounded-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time dept
Last week, five different people emailed me about the Paint The Moon Project that this artist cooked up, where he wants people across the US to shine laser pointers at the moon at a specific point in time in order to create a red dot on the moon. Some scientists have done a few back of the envelope calculations to suggest that there's not much of a chance of it coming close to working, but that's not stopping the guy who's organizing it all.
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I could've told him it wouldn't work
Cheap laser pointers don't have a very well collimated beam, as far as lasers go. In other words, the beam does spread out. I think they're hard to pick up more than a few miles away, although it's been years since I tried to do any experiments like this.
Also, given the artist's terrible instructions on how to point at the moon, I'll bet that most participants won't even be pointing their laser in the right place.
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try this first
Pick a dark country road with a stop sign and walk back about 500 meters. Without sometype of fixed mount, you can't keep the laser aimed good enough to hit a target 500 meters away, let alone the moon with I believe is just a tad farther. Even if you can aim and hold steady the aim, by the time that 3mw signal is absorbed/diffused by two trips thru the earths atmosphere (there and back) there won't be more than a photon or two left which is way below the visiable level.
What's next, have 2 million people in china hop up and down at the same time in order to "spill the coffee" in America?
Time for "art" to take a reality check.
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