[AZ-Observing] Re: Capella at noon

>I have read if you are at the
>bottom of a long smoke stack, like the one at Humboldt, you can see
>stars naked eye.

Philip Plait discusses this in his book, "Bad Astronomy". To summarize, he 
deduces that there are only a half dozen objects of sufficient magnitude to 
be discerned from the background sky during the daytime. However, only two 
of those objects are stars: Sirius and Canopus. The odds of having one of 
those objects pass directly over the opening of a smoke stack become more 
remote. And this difficulty increases in an inverse proportion to the 
diameter of the smoke stack because of amount of sky covered through a given 
opening.

He goes on to describe an experiment by J. Allen Hynek published in Sky & 
Telescope (no. 10 [1951]: 61) in which Hynek and several of his students in 
his astronomy class attempted to see Vega pass through an abandoned smoke 
stack near Ohio University. None of them were able to discern Vega naked 
eye. Some even had binoculars and were still not able to see Vega in 
daylight.

So it would appear that, while not impossible, it is high unlikely that 
anyone would be able to see a star (other than the Sun) during the day time 
with the naked eye.

Sam Rua
Tucson 

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