Seeing Stars During the Day

An old-timer who used to dig bores (wells) for a living once told me that if you go down one to a specific depth, stars are clearly visible in the small circle of sky at the top -during the day!

Does this have something to do with the lack of sideways glare? Or maybe he was just pulling my leg…

Any ideas, O fellow Dopers?

Aren’t you a day early for April Fools Day?

Picture yourself in the hypothetical hole. It’s relatively dark around you, compred to that bright spot of light which is the hole above you. Surely the glare would be so great that anything at all beyond the hole would been seen in silhouette. Any chance of observing stars against that glare would be nil.

Actually, I’m in Sydney, and it’s 1am Sunday, April 1. :smiley:

But, I do agree - it sounds odd. Yet, the old guy seemed quite serious when he told me.

Google. “see stars bottom well”

No.

No.

No.

I’m starting to see a trend here. The Last Word.

No.

I never met the old timer you are talking about, but I read it was possible to see stars that way in a book once. I have NEVER been to the bottom of a well

I read in a “Ripley’s: Believe it or Not!” book that in Australia there is a gorge so narrow and deep that one can see stars in the daytime…sounds like the same phenomena to me.

I read a “Ripley’s Believe it or Not!” book that claimed that a tibetian monastery had a multi-ton boulder miraculously suspended in mid air over it. I think Ripley’s was more interested in entertainment than accuracy.

The reason you can’t see stars in the daytime is that the brightness of the blue sky itself is greater than the brightness of the stars. Being down in a well ain’t gonna change that.

I can see how one might fall down a well and see stars…providing there is no water in the well.

Wouldn’t we be able to see a supernova in our own galaxy during the daytime? I thought I had read that that had occurred during the 16th century.

Is a supernova considered a star? And aren’t we due one in this part of the galaxy?

The quick answer really is no (besides the Sun, of course). You can see Venus during the day, and some claim they can see Jupiter.

The problem is contrast. The sky is very bright, and stars are faint. To be able to see a star, you would need to cut out enough brightness from the sky so that the feeble light from a star is bright enough to see by comparison. The prblem is, to cut out enough light would involve a hole very small–something like 1 arcminute across, or 1/30 of the Moon’s diameter.

If you are in a shaft (down a well, a chimney, etc) with an opening that small, the odds are incredibly low that a star will happen to pass directly overhead that is bright enough to see.

An experiment was done in the 1940s in Ohio when Vega, the 4th brightest star in the sky, would indeed pass overhead, and even with binoculars the star was not seen. So it really does look like this is just a legend.

For historical sake, I’ll mention that Aristotle alluded to this in “On the Generation of Animals” and Charles Dickens does as well in “The Pickwick Papers”.

I heard from an old man that said when he was little in rural Arizona, the sky was so clear that he could see stars during the day.

Are we serious about this??? We see a star every day, it’s called THE SUN. I’m betting that’s what this is all about. Other than a supernova, you’re not going to be seeing one during the day, and surely not from the bottom of a well (that would make it MORE difficult, not LESS difficult!). Sheesh!

Sorry, I guess I got so wrapped up in making nifty links that I was unintentionally obscure.

The answer to the OP’s question, “Can you see stars in the daytime from the bottom of a well?” is, "No."

I assume that this includes “from the bottom of a mine shaft” and “from the bottom of a gorge in Australia”, too. A complete scientific explanation of why we can’t see stars in the daytime may be found at the links provided.

Quoth BobT:

We aren’t “due” for a supernova any more than a certain lottery number is “due”, unless you look at individual stars. They seem to happen in any given galaxy about once every few hundred years, and we haven’t had one in more than that long, but we still probably have to wait a few hundred years or so, anyway.

Yes, you can see a nearby supernova during the daytime (as well as a few other astronomical phenomena, such as bright comets and meteors), but they’re few and far between. Being down a well won’t change things much.

Thanks for the replies everyone, especially Duck Duck Goose for doing the Google thing which I should really have done myself, and also for going to the trouble of posting all those links.

I hadn’t realised this topic was bordering on UL / Snopes status. :o

It wasn’t meant to be a “trick” question involving our own sun, supernovae, or anything to do with Hollywood. It was “stars” in the general sense of the word. Anyhow, I think I’ve got my answer.

BTW, that gorge in Australia is probably Standley Chasm in the Northern Territory. A spectacular and beautiful place, but I’ve never heard the stars story associated with it.

Thanks again, guys.

When I took my “Astronomy for Poets” class at UCLA, the professor said that he felt deprived because we hadn’t had a supernova “locally” for quite a while. I’m sharing in his sense of deprivation.

However, since there have been two comets visible to the naked eye in Southern California (in the city no less) recently, I’ll give the supernovae a pass.