I ran a small private course yesterday and enjoyed a wonderfully ironic moment. It was almost embarrassing.
The first half of the day was spent indoors studying the theory, looking at photographs and playing with celestial models. One of the points I am always keen to make is about the relationship between the uses of our senses and wayfinding. Sight is so often under-rated because its use is so immediately obvious, but we rarely acknowledge how much detail is allowed to escape. For example, we have evolved to identify things by shape much more readily than by colour or shade. Our brains tend to identify an object as a tree, ie. not a threat, and then move on to processing other information without noticing the subtle differences in shades of the leaves at all. Sometimes it pays to rein it in, to force it to focus and to analyse some of…