To see Venus with the unaided eye in a blue sky you need to use foveal vision. Your foveal (central) vision is a 1 degree across. Therefore, finding Venus in daylight is like trying to find a white speck against a sky full of floaters and whitish blobs (blood cells against your retina at the moment) all the while looking through a soda straw from Burger King. :~o It's about impossible to find it for the first time unless you first know about where to look and spot it with binocs or a tele. Tom Iowa USA ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ed Davies" <edavies@nildram.co.uk> To: "Sattelite Observation (E-mail)" <SeeSat-L@blackadder.lmsal.com> Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 10:11 AM Subject: Re: Morning Pass Of ISS > Steve Adams wrote: > > BTW - What an incredible sight Venus is in the southern sky at the moment! - > > It almost looks bright enough to be seen in broad daylight. > > Venus is bright enough to be seen in broad daylight. A more serious > than me amateur astronomer friend pointed it out to a group of us at > my gliding club launch point a few weeks ago at around midday. He knew > where to look, of course. > > I think it helped a bit that there was a band of high cloud close by > allowing the eye to focus properly. In a completely blue sky it is > harder to pick out such small points if your eyes aren't quite > focussed properly. > > Through binoculars Venus showed a crescent quite nicely. > > I was looking for Jupiter the other evening (a few days before the > STS-100 launch) just after sunset - mainly to try to estimate the > earliest time at which it would be at all sensible to try looking for > the ISS and/or shuttle (the STS-100 orbiter and ET were seen from parts > of Europe but it was just too light here to have a chance). Even having > found Jupiter, without any other reference nearby, I still had to search > a bit to find it again a minute or two later. > > As it turned out, I was under a big shower as the STS-100 launch > went by. The weather cleared up and I saw the ISS on the next pass > but by the time the orbiter came round again the orbit plane was > well to the south west and encrouching cloud from that direction > blocked the view. > > Ed Davies > > High Wycombe, England. N51.608 W000.805. > > > P.S: I glad I'm not the only one who has trouble with spelling > words like "Satellite". I never could get the hang of double > consonants. > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' > in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org > http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 10:37:00 PDT