19 January 2011 by Tristan Gooley
Last night was the inaugural meeting of the Night Navigators Club. This is a ‘loyalty club’ for all those who have been on any one of my courses in the past – or those who come on one in the future.
For three years I have been pondering how to solve a tricky riddle. There are so many people who would love to learn about the night sky, but it is very hard to organise an outdoor course for this in this country because the weather is so unreliable. I need to sort the dates for my courses at least a few weeks in advance and it is impossible to predict the conditions that far away. Also, the best times of the year for star, moon and planet-gazing are not the best times for weather. Mid-summer is great for many outdoor activities, but with the late sunsets it is not…
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Tags: auriga, cassiopeia, cygnus, finding north, gemini, jupiter, navigation book, night navigation courses, north star, orion, pegasus, taurus, the plough, uranus |
01 June 2009 by Tristan Gooley
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
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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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Tags: compass, finding north, latitude, longitude, moon, polaris, shadow, sun |
Last night was the inaugural meeting of the Night Navigators Club. This is a ‘loyalty club’ for all those who have been on any one of my courses in the past – or those who come on one in the future.
