Daytime astronomy
Forget staying up late, All About Space shows you how to get stuck into observing without waiting until the small hours
When most people think of astronomy, they picture someone standing outside on a sparkling clear night, gazing up at the wonders of the universe, perhaps using a telescope or binocular, or just sweeping the night sky with their eyes, taking in the view of stars, planets, the Milky Way and other natural nocturnal wonders. Indeed, a Google image search for ‘astronomy’ will bring up hundreds, even thousands, of pictures of people standing on their own, or in a small group, peering into telescopes beneath a star-dusted sky long after the rest of the world has gone to bed.
As the old joke goes, astronomy is the perfect hobby for three types of people: insomniacs, burglars and vampires. But astronomy doesn’t have to be such an anti-social pastime, and it doesn’t have to be done between sunset and sunrise either. It’s possible to do astronomy in the daytime – in fact, it’s a good idea for every stargazer and skywatcher to know what there is to see in the daytime sky because those sparkling clear nights are few and far between, and when they eventually arrive our view of celestial phenomena and events is often spoiled because of light pollution.
Target #1
THE SUN
While it’s our nearest star, the Sun can be a challenging target without the right equipment
The most obvious thing to look for and study in the daytime sky is the Sun. One of the very first things that someone getting into astronomy learns is that the bright white ball they have seen shining brightly in the sky above them all their lives is in fact a star – the closest star to the Earth. The night sky is full of distant suns, each tiny twinkling dot a star like our own. But not exactly like it. Some stars are bigger than our Sun, while some are smaller. Some are hotter, some are cooler. However, like all the stars in the night sky, our Sun is an enormous, hot ball of gas that keeps burning through the process of nuclear fusion, providing us here on Earth with the light, heat and energy we need to survive. And because the Sun is a star, when you look at it you are definitely doing astronomy.
The good news for anyone wanting to observe the Sun is that it’s much closer than almost every other astronomical object. Just 146 million kilometres (90 million miles) away, it’s nearer to Earth than everything except the Moon and a couple of Earth’s sister planets. Its close proximity means we are able to see and study it in great detail from here on Earth – but only if we use the right equipment. The Sun is incredibly bright, and it’s so bright because it’s so hot: on its surface the temperature is a stunning 6,000 degrees Celsius (10,832 degrees Fahrenheit), and its core is even hotter. That means
