Can the Moon be seen during the day?

"The Moon is above the horizon during the day as much as during the night, you just don't notice it as easily," NASA itself answers. It rises and sets for the same reason the Sun does — the Earth rotates once a day — but its rising time shifts a little each day, so over the course of a month it cycles through every possible hour. For much of that cycle it shares the sky with the Sun, so a daytime Moon is nothing out of the ordinary.

The problem isn't absolute brightness: the Moon is the brightest object in the night sky and the second-brightest in the daytime sky, after the Sun. What fails is contrast. During the day, the blue sky is lit by scattered sunlight, and a pale disk against a bright background is easily lost, especially when the visible phase is a thin sliver that returns little light. The same Moon that dazzles at midnight looks like a cut-out of paper at four in the afternoon.

The key is the phase. A first-quarter Moon rises in the afternoon and sits high above the horizon at dusk: it's the easiest case, because in the hours before sunset it's already perfectly positioned with the Sun still up. A last-quarter Moon does the same in the morning, high in the sky at sunrise and during the early hours of the day.

To find it, look away from the Sun, pick a day with a clear sky, and search for a whitish, almost translucent disk, which often goes unnoticed until the eye focuses on it. Binoculars confirm it in seconds and let you make out the maria, the dark stretches of solidified lava. Once spotted the first time, it's hard not to see it afterward.