Abstract: Traditionally, ground based optical astronomy has been restricted to night time observations due to the brightness of the daytime sky background. The advancement of commercial off the shelf (COTS) CMOS detectors (usually used in smart phone cameras) has come so far in recent years that they are now widely used for astronomical observations. They also have the benefit of being able to take millisecond duration exposures, and hundreds of frames per second. Leveraging this technology, we demonstrate successful observations of bright and variable stars at all times of the day with the Huntsman Telescope. In addition, we demonstrate ~10% daytime photometry, and a surprising discovery of the brightness of artificial satellites during the day which we demonstrate to be attributed to Earthshine. I will discuss these recent developments made with the Huntsman Telescope, and the implications that these findings have for space domain awareness performed with small, autonomous COTS telescope systems in an effort to protect assets in space.

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