Tom Wagner said > 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. (Hopefully this isn't too much off charter, now that another Venus-bright satellite is up there.) What you say is generally true -- I've seen Venus in the day sky a fair number of times, but always by sighting along a telescope pointing at it. Except once, in El Paso, when we were watching an air show over Ft. Bliss from the terrace of a friend's house on the eastern side of the Franklin Mountains. We were in the shade (it was early/mid afternoon) and the sky was an unusually deep blue. A few days before, I'd tried to find Venus in the daytime sky and failed, but glancing up then, by gosh, there it was not far from the zenith, quite plain to see. I pointed it out to the others there, and everyone saw it without much trouble. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 - 12:42:10 PDT