Please explain!
If the Dawes limit can be exceeded, then only marginally in a high contrast situation, but on a low contrast object you would not get anywhere near it.
And how would you factor out the deficiencies introduced by the camera lens?
John
Oh my, I best not write late in the evenings, as I am clearly not being clear (my bad).
You can produce an USAF-chart analog in any of the monochrome color. That is still a high-contrast situation. Useful for detecting highest spatial frequencies, where you still can resolve the line pairs. But your results may depend on the color used (due to CA).
However, if you produce an USAF-chart analog not in monochrome (or black and white) but in say, similar shades of gray, you will be in a low-contrast situation, and the result may be much different. This would simulate the Jupiter situation, or in a birding situation, resolving small-scale shades of color say at edges of a bird's feathers. (The other day I was trying to distinguish a common chiffchaff from some other, much rarer species, based on whether the edges of its feathers are greenish or grayish, and I had no such luck with binoculars.)
Sorry to write "above Dawes' limit", I can see how this is understood as
resolution larger than that permitted by diffraction; I meant low-contrast detail of
size larger than the resolution limit; that is, of size which ought to be resolved by good optics if it were high-contrast.
Binastro correctly points out that Dawes' limit does not apply to many binocular situations (unless, say, one observes double stars from a tripod).
Regarding visibility of black dots several times smaller than the Dawes' limit, this is also correct, but here we need to distinguish
visibility from
detectability of unresolved features (where contrast again plays a role).
And as regards MTF... you can define MTF for any optical system, or its part, no? The camera industry does this for complex lenses anyway.