Seeing a star near zenith around sunset I'm recalling while taking a university astronomy class the professor brought a few of us up to the observatory, around sunset.  He showed us a star near zenith with the telescope.  After we left the observatory and were walking back to our dorms we thought we saw the same star, with the naked eye.  The sky still seemed somewhat bright.

Is that possible?
Is that possible?


Yes!


You can see bright stars and planets through a telescope in the evening and in some cases during the day. As magnification increases the brightness of the sky or any extended object decreases with the square of the magnification. For example, a patch of sky will have a certain brightness per square degree, but at 100x magnification it will be 10,000 times dimmer.
A star will (roughly speaking) be simultaneously brighter by the ratio of the square of the telescope's diameter to your pupil (which is 6 millimeters or less), so an 6-inch (15 cm) diameter telescope will make the star look 625 times brighter.
When it got dark, the sky naturally became far dimmer, and your pupils dilated to larger diameters, making the star brighter. 


So you can think of the two methods (viewing through telescope versus waiting for night) as similar, in that they both make the sky dimmer and the star brighter.

It's possible to start guessing what that star might be, but I don't know. Here are two predictions of the sky on November 15 at 5:30 PM and 8:30 PM local time at roughly 42 degrees North latitude. 

That far North there are no planets that could be very close to the zenith, and it would be necessary to know the year as well to see how close one might have gotten.

Images are from in-the-sky.org's planetarium feature.