Venus with the naked eye in Daylight

Thanks to some excellent advice from Neville Young, in his new book Astronomy within Reach, we can all amaze and astound our friends by helping them to see the planet Venus with the naked eye, in full daylight. Regular readers will have already seen photographs showing that such a thing is possible, and should have worked out that Venus is bright enough to show up well against the blue daytime sky. The problem is that the human eye has an autofocus feature which is really hard to override, and if there is nothing clear to focus on then it defaults to a distance of only a few meters. Even if you happen to be looking at the exact spot in the sky, your eye cannot resolve the tiny white pinprick of Venus when it’s so far out of focus, and so it remains invisible.