The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Russ Altendorff came on a course in the hills yesterday. He is a keen sailor, electronics guru and author of a popular blog on the more technological side of marine navigation. During our afternoon we locked horns with topics that ranged from the desert to the ocean and back to a southern England that was experiencing hail, horizontal rain and even the odd sunbeam. We also discussed ‘confirmation bias‘, or the tendency to make your observations fit your preferred hypothesis. Natural navigation is particularly susceptible to this, nature is rarely absolute and is so often open to interpretation. On a cold wet day it is even more likely that you are going to want the evidence to fit your theories.

At the end of the afternoon the sun was down, the moon and Jupiter were high in the southern sky, and it was time for Russ to take…

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I went for a short walk in the dark last night. The clouds were firing past the moon and jupiter giving a very eery feel as the light levels rose and fell dramatically and the wind tore threw the branches. This rushed picture shows a blurred moon, seen through some branches. The moon and Jupiter were very close to each other last night, near conjunction and a blurred Jupiter can hopefully just be seen below it and to the left, also mired in cloud. One of the branches is close to touching it.

This slightly arty (read – bad!) photo from last night shows an overexposed moon, but just below and to the left you can hopefully make out the bright dot that is Jupiter. The moon and Jupiter were in conjunction, or aligned. This is exactly the sort of thing that would have got the ancients into something of a lather. Modern astrologers are no doubt busy, one astrology website outlines the significance as follows:

“You require considerable interaction with people and the environment to stimulate your feelings. This encourages a social awareness and attracts most of your attention. You feel the need to ‘expand yourself’ into the outer world; and your major concern will be the well-being of society and those around you.

You have an innate faith in the goodness of the universe and your fellow humans, and will try to share a positive and creative perspective on life…

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I was up early this morning and caught a great twilight show from Jupiter and Venus. This photo does not do Venus justice, but you might just be able to make it out in the centre of the picture between the two banks of cloud.

Jupiter’s orbit is outside earth’s and so moves through the night sky quite slowly, about one constellation per year.

Venus’ orbit is closer to the sun than ours and so its position in the sky changes quite rapidly. It spends about seven months as a bright object in the early evening sky, before disappearing behind the sun’s glare for about four months and then re-emerging in the early morning for seven months. It then repeats the cycle. Ancient civilisations were divided in their understanding of it, some realising that it is a planet and others giving it two labels, ‘morning star’ and ‘evening star’, without…

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I woke early this morning to a great twilight view of Jupiter, or ‘Jove’ as the Romans liked to call it, over the eastern horizon. It was a welcome coincidence because I had been studying Antarctic exploration late last night and it featured on a couple of occasions.

The wonderfully named Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote the following in his strongly titled account, ‘The Worst Journey in the World’,

“Generally we steered by Jupiter, and I never see him now without recalling his friendship in those days!”

On January 27 1912 Robert Falcon Scott, wrote,

“A long way to go, and, by Jove, this is tremendous labour.” Poor soul survived for another two months after that before finally succumbing on the 29th March. His frozen fingers managed this final entry in his journal, ‘For God’s sake look after our People.’

‘By Jove!’ That, in two words, does a good job of…

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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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Last night was one of those occasions where the moon was the natural navigator’s best option. At about 10pm the sky overhead was overcast with broken clouds down to nearer the horizon. The western glow of dusk was gone and the only objects that could be seen were Jupiter and the three-quarter Moon. The cloud meant no Polaris, and the bright moon in the only patch of open sky blotted out the other stars. The Moon plays hard to get at first but on nights like this it can be a very good friend.