The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

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.

This photo, taken just before six this morning, sums up my senses’ delight at being woken by our kids who decided to hold a animated conference about dinosaurs at half past five. A slightly blurred Venus can just be seen between equally blurred leaves and clouds. If you do happen to be up even earlier, and the clouds allow, then Venus is currently an impressive pre-dawn beacon in the east.

A walk along the edge of Nutbourne marshes on the weekend was an early taste of real summer. A sunny May day often feels hotter than a midsummer one to me, perhaps because I have not yet acclimatised. There were thousands of midges and flies, swirling up from the drying seaweed to complete the sensation.

These two pictures show the same field and only two minutes of walking passed between each shot. It is late afternoon and one of these is taken looking north, the shadows falling to the east and right of each furrow ridge.

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.

Twilight at either end of the day is a good time to look south this month. At dusk Jupiter is the first night object to appear, narrowly but clearly, above the southern horizon. This morning at sunrise Sirius was the last object to disappear, again it was due south. I took these two pictures at 6.30am, one looking east showing the red dawn. The other looking south. It is not a fascinating photo of Sirius but it does at least show that there is nothing else visible around it.

On a tangent, the expression ‘go south’ is often used to mean something is past its best. ‘Tottenham seem to have gone south under Ramos’ influence.’ In the US it was more usually ‘gone west’, but even there south seems to be winning through. If you are something of a verbal sleuth there is a thorough tour of these expressions…

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At 15.44 (GMT) this afternoon the sun crosses the celestial equator. It is the autumnal equinox. What on earth has that got to do with the price of toast, I hear you ask. Well amongst other things it means that today is one of only two days this year that the sun rises and sets due east and west.

Equinox, mmm, equinox, lovely word. Did you know that it comes from the Latin words for ‘equal’ and ‘night’, because on the equinoxes everywhere in the world experiences the same amount of day and night-time?

This is a picture I took about half an hour ago and it is one of those that might be dismissed by those not trained in the dark arts as a ‘typical English country scene’. With closer inspection it yields navigational fruit aplenty.

The foreground shadow confirms that the sun is no longer visible from this viewpoint, but the direction of the early evening sun is easy to detect from the long shadows in the middle ground. We are therefore looking south.

The smoke from the two fires reveals that the wind is light and variable. In the space of little more than a hundred metres it goes from next to nothing to a light north-easterly breeze.

In the top left of the picture, just above the tree line the south coast sea can just be seen. It is running from left to right, or an east-west line, which…

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