Daytime Viewing?

You can also image stars and bright nebulae during the daytime. I tried this experiment awhile back.

The biggest factor is magnification or f/#. By using a Barlow to increase the focal length, the sky background is reduced significantly while the star is reduced not at all. I had a difficult time when imaging M57 in the daytime. The key to resolving this is the F ratio. A short F/ratio single frame background had a lot more "daytime" light or white daytime light.

This was the only way to get anything on the ccd sensor to capture a signal. F/10 worked well with a result with a darker background. The rest is lots of high dynamic range of the camera and gain. Focus was important.

Eamonn A
J62
www.kingslandobservatory.com

I have a question on a similar theme. Anybody care to guess if this LCROSS Lunar impact tomorrow afternoon at 12:30 will be visible in an 11" scope here (i.e. in daylight)? Will any of you be out there trying to observe/image it?

According to APOD , it could be visible in a 10"+ scope in North America & Pacific regions. My guess is we won't see anything from here because the dust cloud that gets kicked up will be washed out by daylight.

Edit / Stellarium says the Moon will only be at 12 degrees above the horizon by that time. Not ideal!

Toward Cabeus with a pencil ,a rough sketch from last night . 150X Seeing 3 ,between clouds 21:30 UT - 22:40 UT Conditions were crap.

Here is my very rough sketch from last night, as you can see Newton , Newton G and Newton A appear very shallow and ill defined, Cabeus is even less so . Mine is an 8 inch dob, 8mm eyepiece ,150 X, I would not expect to see any impact plumb at all at that magnification,even if I was able to turn off the sun for a while.

To observe it best you really need a dark sky and about 500X, so daytime impact viewing may best be seen on NASA TV. However if its clear I will look anyway and maybe try a daytime sketch of the area just out of interest. It may be an historic impact, H2O in the plume could change the face and pace of lunar exploration forever.

Just out of interest here is a great guide to observing the impact, if you are in the right timezone.
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33196816/

And here is another one

science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/05oct_lcrossvg.htm


Deirdre Kelleghan
Vice Char IFAS
Outreach IFAS
www.irishastronomy.org/
www.deirdrekelleghan.com/
twitter.com/skysketcher

Cool! Thanks. Plenty of information on those sites. It appears NASA TV is the best place to observe for us alright. Can't wait to see some of the pictures from around (and above) the Earth, not to mention the results of the spectral analysis!