The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Happy Winter Solstice One and All!

Here’s an interesting solstice fact for you: the Earth is actually receiving more solar radiation at this time of year than at any other time. This is because the Earth does not orbit the sun in a circle, but in an ellipse. In the northern hemisphere winter the Earth is at its closest to the sun, a point called ‘perihelion’, but in summer it is at its furthest point, or ‘aphelion’.

The Guardian have published a little article on the timing of the winter solstice.

However, my favourite solstice image is on a different page. The same technique used in the photo on that page, from the same position, but on the summer solstice would probably not catch the sun at all, or perhaps just a glimpse of it in the top corners.

At this time of year the sun is always…

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I am spending a lot of time at the moment helping the BBC with a new series and have spent the last few days in North Wales.

When I was told that we were going down a slate mine in Snowdonia and that it would be great if there were some natural navigation clues to help us find our way in the mine, I was initially a bit concerned. Natural navigation methods can be used in a very wide variety of locations, including underwater, but I have not spent any serious time caving or in mines and so feared it might be a non-starter. It quickly became clear that I was wrong and that there is not only a method that works, but one that is beautifully simple and almost foolproof.

As is so often the case, the clue had been if not under my nose, then at least above…

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On Friday I enjoyed a warming cup of hot chocolate with adventurer and ocean rower extraordinaire, Sarah Outen. We arranged to meet in Brighton and I had hoped to saunter between the boutiques and purveyors of rare tat, before pulling up a chair in a bohemian cafe near the sea. Instead I sprinted twenty yards from the train station, felt the cold heavy rain run down my neck and then ducked into a disappointingly ordinary peddler of hot drinks.

Fortunately I got a chance to escape all that by listening to Sarah’s memories of rowing, alone, across the Indian Ocean. She experienced plenty of drama as you might imagine, and this will all out in her book that is being published early next year, but the details that seized me were the ones that many others may have found prosaic.

Sarah described how the birds changed as she…

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I woke very early this morning and felt restless so headed into the Downs for a walk. I listened to the Shipping Forecast in the car on the way, feeling instantly integrated into the fragmented dawn community of fishermen and farmers.

There were some spectacular sights as the sun rose and fought back the mist over the Arun Valley. The views were filled with colour experiments too as the pinks and oranges of the sky rose in a crescendo that battled with the whites and greens closer to the ground. In the end the orange clashed too grossly with the yellows of a field of rapeseed and I had to look away.

Yesterday afternoon I received the following email from a young navigator called Luke Hardy:

This Saturday, just gone, myself and two friends went on our local walking competition – the Charnwood Hike.  The aim is to complete…

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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…

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On holiday I did try very hard not to think too much about navigation, but wherever I am I cannot resist checking that the sun is behaving itself appropriately considering my latitude and the season. At 7 degrees north, Phuket is in the northern hemisphere and the tropics and because the sun is now well south of the equator the short midday shadow is cast towards the north. Nearer June this same pencil would cast a shadow in the opposite direction at midday, to the south.

This photo was actually taken eleven minutes after local midday, which is logical since it was taken in the west of Phuket and Phuket itself is in the west of the country, about 2 degrees west of Bangkok. The sun will be at its highest point over Phuket about eight minutes after it has reached its highest point when viewed from Bangkok.

I watched the History Channel’s ‘Expedition: Africa’ last night, a retake on Stanley’s expedition to find Livingstone. It is quite enjoyable if a bit ‘light’, the interest certainly coming from the internal politics of the expedition team rather than the nature of the journey itself. One thing did strike me, one of their challenges is billed as ‘using only compasses and basic maps’, which could only be billed as a challenge in the age of satellite navigation. Even this seemed to rob the team of some of their awareness of their surroundings. Pasquale Scaturro, the navigator, takes a compass bearing and then navigates from ‘tree to tree’ despite numerous clues in the sky and ground to help him hold a course. To be fair Benedict Allen does point out that the river would give a line to follow, but Pasquale does not seem to want the river to get between…

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Tristan


I managed to rope in a friend at the end of an evening’s BBQ and together we plumb-bobbed Polaris, set out two posts and then strung a string between them. We checked with a compass and, despite the evening’s beers, we were actually almost spot on!

The next day we checked the shadow at 1.00 (12 noon GMT) and found this lined up on our string. Impressed or what!

Richard

——————

Hi Richard,

I can see I’m going to need to come up with some sort of merit/badge/star system just to complete the back to school experience!

A link that I will have mentioned on the day is here:

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/AltAz.php

If you plug in your latitude and longitude, it will give you the altitude and azimuth of…

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In this photo you can see the dew that the sun has not yet burnt off. The shadow itself is mostly moving right to left in this picture, leaving the thin band of wet wood in the shade all the time. This thin band is a rough east-west line at all times of the year, but quite an accurate one at times like this, close to the spring and autumnal equinoxes.

The small patch of moisture that is in the sun reveals the direction that the shadow is shortening, a crude north-south line as we near the middle of the day.

A blog is not a blog without an occasional rant, so…

It strikes me that the world of navigation training has strayed a little off course. If you type “navigation courses” into Google you get nearly five and a half million results. I’d be prepared to wager that more than five million of these are associated with ‘traditional’ training. To my mind the majority of these are falling between two stools. They focus on using tools but not the best ones. The two ends of the spectrum are electronics and nature. Nobody, myself included, argues that natural methods are more accurate than electronics when it is working. Equally, nobody in their right mind would want to challenge someone holding a working GPS to a position-fixing competition using compass back-bearings. Where am I going with this?

Well, why do we concentrate the vast majority of our training and learning in the…

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