Daytime star gazing difficult, not impossible

"Why are the stars in the sky only at night?," asked Lily Goluszka, 10, a fifth-grader at O'Plaine School in Gurnee.

Gaze into the night sky and you can see full constellations dotted by countless stars. In the day, it seems like all the stars disappear.

"There are stars in the sky all the time," said Dr. Geza Gyuk, director of astronomy at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. "During the daytime the sky is too bright to be able to see them."

There is one star we can see nearly every day - that's the Sun. It is so bright it makes the other stars look very faint and distant.

"Under the right conditions it is actually possible to see the very brightest stars in the daytime," Gyuk said. "You need to know exactly where to look and have good eyes. With a telescope you can actually see a few dozen stars."

Above the Arctic Circle, in Siberia, Greenland and northern Canada, a solar eclipse will be visible for one minute and 45 seconds on Aug. 1. Eclipse watchers who take their eyes off that spectacular event will also be able to see Venus and Mercury and some brighter stars.

The Arctic Circle regions are so very far north that normally during that time period the Sun is visible nearly 24 hours a day. "For some of the locations this will be the first night they will have experienced in months," Gyuk said.