View planets in the day time?

You bet! And that's hardly news to veteran observers. But I have to admit I haven’t bothered to look for planets in the daylight before for a variety of reasons. However, I've been reading "Seeing in the Dark" by Timothy Ferris – a book about amateur astronomy by one of the best science writers I know of – and I've found it inspiring in several ways.

In this particular instance he was talking about Venus and how it was better seen by daylight. Well – I've looked at it in the dusk and the dawn, watching earlier this spring right through to sunrise. Basically, the rising sun gets rid of the glare. But I stopped as soon as the sun came up.

I also observed Venus a couple of years ago in daylight as it crawled across the disc of the sun. It does this a couple of times every hundred years or so. The Next time will be June 5-6, 1012. That time I projected an image onto a piece of cardboard – I didn’t have a solar telescope then – and snapped a picture. Venus is the little black dot on the red ball of the sun.

This morning was different. I was out at 3 am and there were clear skies and I was able to get reacquainted with old friends – mostly open clusters such as M34, 36, 37, 38 and 35 – and ,of course, the Pleiades, M45. That was very satisfying as these are basically winter-sky objects that I haven’t seen in months. I was using the LX90 in the domed observatory and as dawn approached on a whim I asked the computer to look-up Venus. It told me it would rise at 5:04 – just a minute or two away. So I waited a few minutes, then pushed the "go to" button. I knew Venus would be below the trees, right on the horizon, but I hoped it would find it and lock on and track it – and it did.

I came back nearly four hours later and was treated to a wonderful view of a pure, white marble. It was just 10 seconds in diameter, less than one-third of what Jupiter is right now. But I want to make note of it now and experience over the coming months some of what Galileo must have experienced four hundred years ago. Of course I know what was then heresy for Galileo – that the planets are orbiting about the sun.

I know, for example, that Venus right now is way over on the other side of the sun from us and so it appears both small and round – "full," so to speak, like a full moon. But I also know that next winter we'll be slowly over-taking it - or it will be overtaking us. We'll both be on the same side of the sun and I'll be able to watch it go slowly through moon-like phases until in July it will be just a slither – a thin, but because of it's nearness, very bright crescent.

When Galileo figured this out, he sent Kepler a message in code. It was critical information, but just the kind of thing that the Church did not want to hear. I see no clash between religion and science, by the way, but I think many times religious leaders feel threatened by science – feel that this undermines their power in some way.

But back to planets in the day light. What was neat about this morning was that the telescope's "go to" mechanism worked so well that it found Venus, put it in the center of a fairly powerful eyepiece, and held it there four four hours. If I had come back at 9 am to look and it had not been in view I was not going to move the telescope in an attempt to find it. The sun was just 14 degrees away and a small slip and I could do serious damage to my eyes. Bottom line – I don’t recommend looking for Venus and Mercury with hand-controlled scopes. Well, Venus sometimes is far enough away so the risk is minimal – but Mercury always is quite close. Using the computer, and even then approaching cautiously, is for me the only way to do this. The sun makes me very nervous and our eyesight is just too valuable to risk. Even with the computer, I held a card behind the eyepiece to make sure it wasn't projecting an image of the sun or any part of it. Once sure it was in the clear, I put my eye to it. Once I saw Venus, I knew I was a safe distance away and could look in the finder as well, which showed it only as a bright, white point in the blue sky.

Stay tuned. I'll be exploring this day time viewing thing more as time goes on.