The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

For the past few evenings I have been heading out into the Downs to find a good spot to keep watch out to the west. A sunset is always worth a walk, but there is rarer game worth hunting for in the skies at the moment. Unfortunately the clouds came in at the last minute last night and obscured Venus and Mercury again.

Such a shame, it would have been an unusually good opportunity to catch them going to bed together. Fear not, I have a near foolproof plan for spotting them and shall report back with my results. If, over the next few days, you do catch a clear sky and setting sun, hold tight and wait for the two bright beacons that will follow the sun down.

There was a review of the book in Easter’s Sunday Telegraph.

I don’t know what you’re going through in your part of the world, but here in southern England there have been all the symptoms of a passing cold front recently. It has turned colder and there have been extreme changes of weather, with stormy downpours. The sun is out at this second, but the grass is poking up through a mat of hailstones.

I took this photo of an isolated cumulonimbus cloud and it shows one of the culprits in action. Spied on a horizon, this is exactly the sort of cloud that  should send a walker, sailor or pilot rummaging around in a bag for a Plan B!

There is a review of the book in the Irish Times this morning. If I’m honest it is the sort of review that, from an author’s perspective, a cold front can do little to dampen. Did they know that my middle name is Patrick?

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At the moment, I’m trying to get the word out to the orienteering community about the joys of natural navigation.

I’m also panning for nuggets of shiny information, any techniques that might be being used that I have not come across. So, if you know any orienteering navigators out there please ask them to get in touch.

Thanks!

T

Thanks to everyone who came to hear my talks and buy the book at the Outdoors Show yesterday. I will be giving the talks again today and on Sunday at the following times on the stage at the Wilderness Camp:

1.15: The Wonderful World of Natural Navigation. A quick peek at a couple of the journeys that led to my passion for the subject, including the transatlantics, and then a whirlwind tour of lots of techniques that you can use yourself.

4.00:  Navigating Using the Night Sky. The ways we can use the stars, moon and planets to find our way. Introducing the ‘celestial sphere’, which despite its name is a great way to simplify the night sky.

I will be signing copies afterwards so bring yours along if you already have one or hopefully there will be some left to buy later at the show.

Hope you can make it!

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A really great crowd came to my talk at the Oxford Literary Festival yesterday. The room was packed, which is always exciting. It did mean that the temperature levels rose as oxygen levels fell, but enthusiasm for the subject never waned. In this sense the admirable audience took the sun as their model, not the moon. Thank you to everyone who came to the talk and for making it one of those days that gives a writer a warm feeling, one that lasts outside the room, in the cool fresh air.

Book update… Amazon and Waterstones online are now restocked. The second reprint should be ready by next week, so any supply problems should start to ease then.

Sorry if you are trying to buy a copy of ‘The Natural Navigator’ – Amazon have sold out again!

After selling out, restocking and two reprints in the past three weeks, the book is now temporarily out of stock again on Amazon. Another massive thanks to everyone who has bought a copy so far.

You can still order it from Amazon. Or there are still quite a few bookshops that have a copy (worth phoning before), or online while stocks last at these places:

The Book Depository

Waterstones

Foyles

The photo above is of the hill to the east of my home, taken very early this morning. This is the first time this year that the morning light has appeared from the north of the hill. By June the sun will have moved all the way up to northeast.

There is a really good attempt to give a flavour of the whole subject of natural navigation in an article in the Independent today by Tim Walker. Tim came for a walk in London to sample natural navigation urban-style.

Anyway, flower pot time. Take a look at this photo that I took yesterday just before lunch. Note the wet ground in the shade and how the shadow of the pot has moved ‘up’ leaving a wet area in its wake. The shadow is moving west to east, away from the camera. As it is close to the middle of the day, the sun is close to south and to the right of the picture. The shadow of the young tree is a near perfect north-south line.

There is also a shadow in the pot itself, on the right, southern side. This shade is allowing one side to stay moist longer than the other,…

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A beautiful six day old moon is hanging high in the sky at the moment. There are some weird, wonderful and slightly complex ways of using it to find direction. There is also a really easy one that takes less than five seconds. The method is on page 147 of the book, with an illustration on page 148.

Are those cries of, ‘You tease!’, I hear echoing around the blogosphere?

I’ve just found out that the May 2009 BBC Countryfile episode where I took Jules Hudson for a taste of natural navigation in the South Downs has been uploaded to YouTube.

Happy Spring Equinox!

My plans this morning, as announced in the Telegraph, were to head to the top of a hill and catch the sun rising due east. Sadly, the air is cooler than its dewpoint… the humidity is greater than 100%… there is a low level of nimbostratus… however you want to put it: the weather is not very good and the visibility is terrible.

Had I been able to see the sun it would have risen due east. The vernal and autumnal equinoxes being the only two days of the year when the sun rises due east.

Something that you cannot notice on any individual day, but only by studying the sun’s rising position over the course of a year from the same location, is that its rising and setting positions are changing by more at this time of year than at any other time. Near the solstices the sunrise position…

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