20 September 2011 by Tristan Gooley
OK, it’s confession time. Again.
I’m just back from a week’s holiday with my wife on the Greek island of Kefalonia. It was our first holiday without the kids for about seven years, which felt bizarre from start to finish. This is the only, admittedly weak, excuse for the navigational lapse that ensued.
In Fiskardo, at the northern end of Kefalonia, we hired a small day-boat and spent many mornings motoring up and down the east coast of Kefalonia. We pursued the not very stressful business of hunting quiet bays and seeking secluded beaches for a swim.
On the fifth morning we putt-putted all the way round the northern Kefalonian coast to a beach at the northern tip of the island called, Dafnoudi beach.
We had spent almost all of the week on the east coast of the Kefalonia looking across the water, to the east, and seeing the beautiful…
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Tags: ancient greeks, east, greece, nautical navigation, north, Odysseus, odyssey, south, sun, sun compass |
23 March 2009 by Tristan Gooley
As we move on away from the equinox I thought I would post this photo of the lines made by the shadow tip from a stick (or in this case a kids swingball!).
These two lines are from the shadows approaching noon and only one day apart. Since it is the equinox, they are near exact east/west lines. The gap between the chalk lines is at its greatest at the equinox and closes to near zero at the solstices.
On a slight tangent, it was a very similar method, ie. measuring the length of the shadows that helped the ancient Greeks come up with their first estimates of the size of the earth.
Tags: ancient greeks, east, equinox, noon, shadows, size of the earth, west |
OK, it’s confession time. Again.
