How many stars would be visible to us, using instruments of course, during daytime hours?? Has anyone ever attempted to view bright stars in daylight?? (Besides the sun of course)
Below is a quote from Dennis Persyk, on one of the lists I belong to. Personally, I have seen stars to mag 2 quite easily in an 8" reflector and with the same instrument Alpha Centauri was a beautiful sight.
Terry
Quote by Dennis Persyk
"I do a fair amount of daylight observing at noontime with my C-11 on a goto mount. My visual observations seem to conflict with your calculations. I assume you will concede that if I can see a star, I can easily image it with my digital camera with just one frame."
"What I note is that the visual limiting magnitude is a strong function of the angular distance of the star from the sun. Not surprising, is it? Mie and Raleigh scattering are highly angular dependent. I also have an easier time seeing stars (and planets) at noon with larger apertures than smaller apertures – I missed how you accounted for the aperture effect in your calculations."
"From my observing log of Sept 7, 2003, 10:57 am local time: I see Regulus, magnitude 1.36, very clearly, with the PanOptic 19 mm eyepiece. Regulus was degrees, 11 minutes from the sun."
"Moving to greater angular distance from the sun, I easily see Izar, Epsilon Bootes, at magnitude 2.35 with an angular separation of 55 degrees, 52 minutes from the sun. The farther from the sun, the dimmer the star I can see."
"I also observed the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn. I set out to image these objects with the digital camera, but instead just enjoyed visually observing them. Besides, imaging bright (in the eyepiece) stars seemed a bit like shooting fish in a barrel – no sport."
I just had a browse through some of my archives and found this daytime image of Jupiter, captured at 4:42pm, also showing 3 of the Galilean satellites, Io, Europa and Ganymede.
The image was taken with the Meade LPI through my Vixen 4” F9 refractor.
I tried this very exercise at Snake Valley in November this year (2007). It was into the high 20's, not a cloud in sight and HOT! The C11 was still set up from the night before so the GoTo was pretty close. I was able to see down to Regulus with relative ease. I don't see any reason why over a year you should not be able to see all of the 30 brightest stars...and more, in the middle of the day. Just protect the scope from looking at the Sun when it is slewing.
I've only seen Jupiter once in daylight through my 8" and I must say I was
surprised at how much colour you could see, well worth taking a look. Seen
venus naked eye midday numerous times and Sirius once.
It is special to see some of the brighter stars in a blue sky, I always take the time to jump back to them for a good look after a mid afternoon setup. The best day time view that I've had was a Venus occultation by thin crescent Moon in 04 at midday very beautiful. I've attached a not so good photo from that day.
