The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Those who have been on a course will know the strange pleasure that I get from connecting seemingly unrelated things through natural navigation, so here, before your eyes I will attempt to connect a cat on a dustbin and a Greek orthodox priest.

The Gooleys have just returned from a week visiting family in the Peloponnese. My brother’s house is high in the Greek hills and we found ourselves following the same route down a few times each day on the way to towns, villages or the beach. It was during these trips in the car that I noticed that certain animals and indeed, in the case of one Greek orthodox priest, people appeared with a soothing predictability at certain points on the journey.

There was a corner that I remembered well for the dustbin which invariably had this cat sitting on it, and the turning to the beach was nearly always…

Read More...

The incestuous relationship between the stars and mythology is nothing new, but we often overlook how constantly the relationship is rekindled or how fresh some of the stories are. The following paragraph is from Emily Winterburn’s entertaining new book, ‘The Stargazer’s Guide‘.

‘In Orion these [stars] are Rigel, Betelgeuse and Bellatrix; in Canis Major there is Sirius – and even Canis Minor, which essentially consists of only two stars, has the very bright Procyon. These are familiar names, but not perhaps for astronomical reasons. Bellatrix and Sirius are probably better known now as characters in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, while Betelgeuse was the title of a Tim Burton film, albeit with a different spelling [Beetlejuice].

On Sunday morning, when sailing off the south coast, visibility came down to a few hundred metres at times. The sun played some of its usual tricks in the fog and one that I don’t think I’ve seen before. When looking down-sun it created a colourless rainbow-like arch with pure white underneath, it was very like sailing past the Millennium Dome, or whatever it’s called these days. At one point there was one visible when looking towards the sun as well, it felt like sailing between two domes. Surreal.

We were out of sight of land for most of the morning even though it was no more than a couple of miles away for a lot of the time. A small bird (Tit, Warbler?) landed for a brief inspection of some of the ropes, which was comforting and reassured me that we were still within reach of land!

…

Regular readers may recall how my chilli plants demonstrated an aversion to wind and cold. Yesterday I spent a full and enjoyable day with some of the team from Sire Technology, who were braving the Pathfinder course.

The day consists of an intense morning of indoor training followed by a good leg stretch in the South Downs. Part of the morning is spent going through a few exercises aimed at awakening the senses and raising awareness. I was delighted therefore when, during the afternoon’s practical exercise, Barry from Sire pointed out something that I had walked past without noticing several times. The photo is taken looking northeast and the corn that is being shielded from the sun’s rays by the trees to the left of the picture is fairing a lot worse than that to the right.

On a tangent… Before writing this post I thought that I would try to solve something…

Read More...

If you thought that you might escape with only one blog posting after two days at sea, then you were mistaken. I’ll restrain myself and add just one more for now. This is my wife, Sophie, looking a touch unamused at this version of sailing. I think her idea is more Mediterranean, perhaps even cocktails and Caribbean. Not motoring through a cold October mist in the dark.

My wife and I spent nearly all the weekend on the water, which will be a rare treat until our boys are a bit older. There was lots of sun, plenty of mist and fog and not very much wind. It would have been nice to have done more sailing and less motoring, but we were ecstatic just to be out there.

In my last entry I talked about dawn and dusk colours, these two dawn pictures show the shift in colour quite nicely. There was only one minute between the two shots. Interestingly it appears to have reddened, which is not what we’d usually expect to see – ah, nature, that slippery friend!

Natural navigators will have spotted already the windswept nature of the trees on the shoreline, confirming that we are indeed looking southeast.

A fresh peach of a dawn this morning. The contrails in the first photo have a clear southeast track to them which is not unexpected as there’s lots of civilisation to the distant southeast of Sussex and relatively little in other distant directions.

Dawn light always feels very different to sunset light. I use the word feel deliberately, because the actual light and colour differences are often subtle. Even if they look similar our normal sleep patterns and lifestyles, combined with the temperature differences mean that we rarely look at a sunset and dawn with similar sensations. If we are in a familiar place we know where to expect morning or evening light, but even mid-Atlantic robbed of lots of other stimuli they feel massively different, one heralding an end to cold and the other respite from sweltering.

But do they actually look different? Yes. The familiar pinks, oranges and reds can often…

Read More...

My thanks to David Higham who attended a course last Saturday and sent in this image of the Caracol Observatory Tower at Chichen Itza and also for drawing my attention to the fact that the later additions are aligned differently, possibly accounting for the need to track different celestial objects or even for differences due to the precession of the equinoxes.

I was enjoying the view down a misty valley this morning when a flock of gulls went overhead. I took a quick photo and had low expectations of its quality. As you can see it is not going to win any awards, but the faint shape of an upside down Big Dipper did stare back at me when I downloaded the pictures. Signs, signs everywhere, but what do they all mean?

A good morning for the stars, but a bit damper in West Sussex than camels would like. Still, no reason not to enjoy an excerpt from Clinton Bailey’s 1974 article about Bedouin Star Lore:

Even in the late twentieth century many Bedouin are familiar with Polaris
(called al-Jidi) and Canopus (Suhayl), the two stars that indicate the directions
north and south. When a Bedouin, composing a poem, wanted to relate that
he was travelling south-east, for example, he said:
‘Ahutt al-Jidi ‘ald wirk il-matiyyah
W’adhrT naharhd ‘an Suhayl al-yimain’

‘I put Polaris on the thigh of my mount
While shielding her throat from Canopus south ‘.