The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

I quickly reached for my camera when I saw these objects in the sky. The picture was taken without a tripod and so they are a little blurred, but it is still just possible to make out the lights. A few seconds later the sky looked completely different and this could lead to suspicions that something unusual was going on, perhaps even stir suspicions of UFOs. The true explanation is very straightforward.

The bright light to the left of the picture is an aircraft turning towards the camera with its landing lights on. The bright light near the top of the picture is Venus. There is a fainter light, barely perceptible amongst the edges of the top part of the cloud and this is Mercury. A few seconds later the aircraft had turned fully and effectively disappeared from view and Mercury had disappeared behind a cloud making the sky appear…

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For the past few evenings I have been heading out into the Downs to find a good spot to keep watch out to the west. A sunset is always worth a walk, but there is rarer game worth hunting for in the skies at the moment. Unfortunately the clouds came in at the last minute last night and obscured Venus and Mercury again.

Such a shame, it would have been an unusually good opportunity to catch them going to bed together. Fear not, I have a near foolproof plan for spotting them and shall report back with my results. If, over the next few days, you do catch a clear sky and setting sun, hold tight and wait for the two bright beacons that will follow the sun down.

There was a review of the book in Easter’s Sunday Telegraph.

Yesterday afternoon I threw the snow off the Land Rover and headed out into the white – I had about half-a-dozen minor outstanding ‘to-do’s for the book, but there is no point writing a book about natural navigation if you are the sort of person who can resist these conditions. Dressed in a suitably ridiculous balaclava I made my way to the foot of Halnaker Hill and then proceeded uphill in wellies. Unless I’m on a mountain I find wellington boots with two pairs of socks the ideal footwear for small excursions in snow, even good hill-walking boots let some moisture in eventually, but wellies do at least stay dry even if it means slipping about a bit in places.

A roe deer jumped across the path in front of me as I climbed the hill and there was the red breast of a robin waiting on the branch…

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