How can we see the sun and not see some other planets, like Venus despite them being closer to Earth than the sun is?

Question

I tried googling this, but I couldn’t understand what it meant, so can anyone here help me out?

In: Physics

Answer 1

The Sun is bright, insanely bright, and since the atmosphere scatters light it effectively glows during the day and keeps you from seeing dim things.

The way we measure how bright something appears from Earth is with Apparent Magnitude, a change of 5 is 100x change in brightness. The star Vega is the 0 reference, the asteroid Vesta at its brightest is +5.2 or about 100x dimmer while Venus at it brightest is -4.92 or about 100x brighter than Vega but usually its closer to -3. The Sun meanwhile is coming in at -26.7 or over 100,000,000x brighter than Venus at its brightest. That’s a bit inconvenient for observations…

The dimmest thing you can see during daytime is -4 so you could be able to see Venus at its brightest, except that’s when it is *right* next to the Sun and about to dip behind it so you can generally only see Venus right around dawn and dusk when the sky is dim enough and during periods when Venus is at a better angle from the sun for us. Only being able to see Venus near dawn and dusk is why it was called the Morning Star. If you ever see a star in the morning and go “wow that’s stupid bright!” that’s Venus.