2012-12-03
It is that time of year when nature likes to get out her frost compasses for us to admire.
I took this photo last Friday in the middle of the day.
We are looking due west.
The southern sun has thawed the areas it can get to, but unlike other suns, it cannot refresh the parts it cannot reach. (My apologies, I think a retro marketing slogan tried to creep in there.)
The frost shadow on the sand itself is quite straightforward, but the shadows and frost on the logs are more interesting, particularly when…
2010-02-26
... or a clue to direction. One of the challenges in natural navigation that never goes away is the need to constantly change our focus. Our eyes have a tendency to drift towards a middle-distance focus. This can mean that clues in the background and the foreground can be easily overlooked. The first photo of a field on the lower slopes of a volcano in La Palma is a good example of this. There is a temptation to look to the trees for help, and they do offer some, but better help can be found much closer as the second…
2009-04-10
I've been experimenting over the past few nights, as we approached the full moon, with a technique that I've been working on that combines two others. It is possible to find direction using the moon in a number of ways: by its shadow, by using a tangent to its crescent and by understanding its phase relationship with the sun. A very indirect method, that I have not come across anywhere else before, is to use moonlight reflected off cloud edges to reveal the direction of the moon, then to use an understanding of its phase to determine direction. Like a…
