Alpha Centauri in full daylight

[skysurfer]

Holding my Powershot S100 behind the Nagler 13 eyepiece of my ED110 scope (59x), the double star is clearly visible, so I took a film of which I extracted the best frame (most are spoiled by atmospheric turbulence).

Alpha Crucis was also visible as a double but could not record it properly.

I have taken both at about 9:00 AEDT in the morning on 1 March.

[AstroJunk]

Nice one, it always amazes me how many stars can be seen in the day. I was out with a surveyor one time and for fun we punched a few Alt-Az coordinates of bright stars into his theodolite and he was gobsmacked :lol:

[Tinderboxsky]

Excellent capture Skysurfer. It is good representation of the daylight view I see through a telescope.
I enjoy these views - bright specks against the beautiful blue sky.
I much prefer Venus in the daylight. The disc does not seem to suffer from the bloating that occurs against a black sky. A crescent Venus in daylight is truely jewel like. A bright star in the same FOV adds to the spectacle.

[leon]

Well bugger me, I didn't even consider doing that ever, nice job Skysurfer.

Leon

[h0ughy]

Nice one. Scott Alder is a legend for doing stuff like this. Even chasing comets to within a shadow of his primary mirror near the sun. I wouldn't recommend it. Well done

[LewisM]

Done it a few times naked eye in the day, if the conditions are right. Kunama and myself have done this a few times while setting up out near Yass (while Guido just squints....). Takes real concentrtiing to focus at infinity but it can be done.

Thankfully, my distance vision is still VERY sharp, unlike my close vision, which is a blurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry.. ..

[glend]

Yes its all out there of you just look. I recall a daytime occlusion of Saturn by the quarter Moon a couple of years back, it appeared as Saturn diving into the Moon, and then magically reappearing as it came out behind the dark side limb. Try using a red filter on your eyepiece, it improves the daytime contrast significantly.

[strongmanmike]

Ha! excellent! :clap:

[bigjoe]

Bravo Skysurfer!

Only done this a few times myself , but never bothered to post..and a red filter as Glen suggests will help.

I've used a light red filter on the Primaries of some very bright doubles, just to detect the faint companion from all the glare and scattered light in larger apertures...esp Dobs of 10"and over.

bigjoe.

[Wavytone]

As a student long ago in my spare time I worked as a chairman for a surveyor, and one day out in the bush we did the same as a means of determining position directly from stars in daylight (I knew the spherical trig maths). We did a whole series of measurements on each of 4 stars and set up our own reference point. From memory we used precision clock timings as stars crossed micrometer lines in the telescope either side of the meridian to determine longitude, and for latitude, used the altitude as they cross the meridian. The USNO almanac provided corrections due to refraction and precession etc.

Theres also the "surveyors formula" to determine long & lat directly from the alt & az of two stars, corrected for refraction & precession and the time difference between the measurements, though not as good as the above method.

Both worked quite well when compared with measurements from distant trig stations, and he was most impressed.

A few years later when Dave Herald was organising Bailey's Beads timing at solar eclipses, if you had good data USNO would subsequently visit the site to do an astrometric survey to determine your position using the same methods.

This was long before the advent of GPS, obviously.

[Octane]

That is very cool!

H

[multiweb]

Nice catch. :thumbsup: