The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Last night I stumbled across a name I have been looking for since a sailing trip a couple of months ago, when I took this photo. I now know that the unusual phenomenon in this picture is called a ‘fogbow’. It is similar to a rainbow in many ways, but the fog droplets are so small that instead of light being refracted it is instead diffracted, which leads to a white arc instead of the more familiar colours. Coloured and white bows can occasionally be seen at night, if there are the right atmospheric conditions and a bright moon, but these are given the fair name of ‘moonbows’.

Apparently it also has something to do with quantum wavelengths, but that sounds like one for a rainier day than today and it’s pretty wet out there as it is.

There are those that suspect the Natural Navigator’s life to consist of lying on the teak deck of a yacht musing about celestial bodies. It has happened, I cannot deny, and I do not wish to dampen such fanciful ideas, but it is not the bread and butter of this business.

There is a scene from that great movie, Point Break, where Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) is being shown round his new workplace, the armed robbery division of the LA FBI. His new boss is keen to dispel any romantic notions his green recruit may have of playing cops and robbers,

“Do you know how we nail the bad guys, Utah? … By crunching data. Good crime scene work, good lab work, and most importantly, good data-based analysis.”

Johnny Utah goes on to disprove this mundane prognosis in solid Reeves style, but that is not the point. At least not the one…

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I was reading about the death of a hiker on a walking forum recently and ended up posting a reply, it turned out to be a bit more of a sprawl than I expected. Readers of this blog should not be spared such ordeals, so here it is:

My work means that I have to try to understand the line between unreasonable risk and interesting challenge well. I also find myself drawn into the debate against my will occasionally if I get accused of recklessness.

There is not a lot of evidence that I am aware of that suggests that government involvement stops people from finding danger. There is however a strong theory that people will select the level of risk they are comfortable with, regardless of what others do. This is often illustrated by road safety arguments, the more ’safe’ the roads are made the more dangerously the average person drives. There have…

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Dawn is a critical and exciting time for the natural navigator, it sets up the day. It is also a time of rapid change, I took the second of these two photographs only one hour after the first yesterday morning, but that need not catch us off guard.

With experience it is possible to tell that this moon is two days off a new moon, which means that it will rise two of my fist-widths (24 degrees) ahead of the sun. The sun travels through the sky at just over a full fist width (15 degrees) an hour. It was therefore possible for me to gauge that the sun would rise in about one and half hours just by looking at the low moon in a dark sky.

A great morning for stargazing and one planet in particular was holding court. Saturn hung brightly in the southern sky between Virgo and Leo.

In astronomical terms Saturn is an impressive planet, the second largest in the solar system and girded by its famous rings. It also comes with as much religion and mythology as you could ask for on a crisp November morning.

Saturn featured very strongly in Roman religion as the harvest god, responsible for sowing, seed and most things agriculture. His festival, Saturnalia, was a time of much merriment and became the most celebrated of Roman festivals as tools were downed, slaves granted temporary freedom and ‘certain moral restrictions were eased’, and for all their seriousness in battle the Romans sure knew how to ease a moral restriction when they chose to. It was such a success that we are still feeling its partying power to this day. Saturnalia…

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The last course stirred up some healthy discussion about the difference between the sun’s summer and winter arcs in the sky. The arcs are actually very similar, because they are parallel, but in our winter the arc is displaced to the south. However, the effect this has on shadows is more interesting and beguiling. The arc traced by shadows over the year are not parallel, but change quite significantly from summer to winter. This is because the sun rises north of us in summer and south of us in winter. The effect this has on shadows is quite counter-intuitive, but no less fascinating for it. The chalk line in this photo shows how the shadow from the edge of a flower tub moved this morning. In the summer it would have curved the other way and closer to the pot.

I had an enjoyable and full day yesterday holding a Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation course at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington. We were in the Lowther room for the day, one of the many rooms at the RGS that oozes character and a sense of history. Even when stepping into the room for the first time, a lot of people experience a feeling of familiarity as it has appeared in many films.

There was a great group for the course from very diverse backgrounds, from the art world to the military. Some of us were busy chatting over a cup of tea, about the room and the sort of figures from history that would have shared the same space, Shackleton and Co, when Sir Ranulph Fiennes passed us in the corridor.

It was one of those serendipitous moments that does no harm to the romantic mystique of the place.

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When sorting some photos last night this picture – taken a few weeks ago on a very cold morning in Chichester harbour – came close to being deleted. I had a change of heart and decided to rescue it and elevate it to my blog. Rarely have the fortunes of a picture changed so suddenly or dramatically… OK, that’s a bit much, not least since it is a rubbish picture. It’s one redeeming feature and indeed its only feature is that the flash does help illustrate that fog is made up of lots of tiny droplets.

It is only a small step from thinking about such things to wracking one’s mind desperately trying to understand the difference between fog and mist. They are essentially the same, it is a question of degree. Fog is just mist that you can’t see very far in. Pilots define this being less than 1000 metres,…

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A robin’s trademark red breast has always struck me as one of nature’s less enthusiastic attempts at camouflage. We went for a family walk in the woods yesterday and this particular robin was very friendly. Even so, when I tried to take a picture of him I sometimes lost him from view as he blended with the leaves.

Blue water sailors are aware that birds can be used in finding land, but walkers tend to overlook one of the simplest of navigational clues. The more friendly the birds, the closer you are to civilization. It’s not just birds either, town foxes are becoming positively insolent.

Chichester Cross is a slightly mysterious stone construction at the heart of my home town. It has been around for five hundred years or more and has endured its share of sun, wind and rain in that time. The two larger pictures show the effect of just 6 years of exposure.

The elements do not come at it from uniform or random directions though and so it feels the effects in different ways on each side. This leads to different erosion patterns and weathering marks. It also means that lichens find different sides more or less appealing. The smaller pictures show the edges of the eight flying buttresses. No two are the same.