23 October 2010 by Tristan Gooley
I have just been watching a beautiful full moon rising above the trees in the east. It was shrouded in layers of cirrostratus for a few minutes, but then rose above them.
In winter full moons rise north of east, in summer they rise south of east. They rise further from east the nearer we get to the solstices. The full moon always behaves in the opposite way to the sun, in time and direction, as it is opposite the sun in its cycle.
11 October 2010 by Tristan Gooley
We are bearing down on stargazing-season. It is getting dark early enough in the evenings, staying dark long enough in the mornings and doesn’t yet freeze you for the privilege.
This morning I enjoyed a view of Orion, Sirius, Leo, which has just marched ahead of the dawn sun now, and a few other players. I took this photo of Orion’s Sword hanging down to the left (eastern) side of a large beech tree and dangling down towards the south, as it does. The ‘smudge’ in the middle is the Great Nebula in Orion, also known less romantically as ‘M42′. It is a ‘stellar nursery’ where new stars are born. Would a more appropriate term not be a ‘stellar maternity ward’?
On a different subject, my best wishes and good luck to Kevin Shannon who is attempting a zero-emissions circumnavigation of the globe. He asked me for my thoughts,…
08 October 2010 by Tristan Gooley
These two photographs were taken this morning, within a few seconds of each other and from exactly the same spot. In the book I touch on the difference between viewing mist horizontally and vertically and these pictures illustrate the point nicely.
Mist and fog, which is just a word for intense mist, are low visibility caused by looking through millions of suspended water particles. When we look horizontally we have to look through hundreds of metres of these particles and the effect is very poor visibility. But since the mist often sits in a thin blanket that hugs the land, the story is very different when we look vertically upwards. (Or downwards if you are a pilot searching for somewhere to land.)
Looking upwards it is often possible to find clouds, as in the second picture, and if you have remained tuned to the direction the clouds are moving,…
10 September 2010 by Tristan Gooley
The past few days have seen me bouncing between meetings in London – pinging between Kensington, White City and Theatreland. Throw in a Tube strike on the Tuesday and the stage was set for some urban natural navigation.
The sun, trees, churches, clouds and satellite dishes all played their parts, but there are so many lesser known roles in the epic production that is ‘City Navigating’.
As if to prove this I received a message a couple of days ago from someone who had read the book and got in touch with some intriguing urban ideas. Clem McEwen drew my attention to two methods which sounded familiar, but which are certainly not well known to me, or used by me… yet!
1) Street numbering. Streets are normally numbered in ascending order away from the centre of a town, with the numbers 1 and 2 being closest to the centre, normally…
29 August 2010 by Tristan Gooley
Tom Vanderbilt, the journalist and best-selling author of ‘Traffic‘, flew over from the States to join me in Dartmoor last week for a taste of natural navigation in the wild.
His account will be appearing in the US magazine, ‘Outside‘, in due course so I won’t spoil the fun here, but I will write it up and publish it on this website once Tom’s Outside article has run. Suffice to say that Dartmoor did not pull any punches and a meteorologically intense time was enjoyed.
The Natural Navigator book is being published in the US on 1st January 2011.
31 October 2009 by Tristan Gooley
… from a fortnight’s family break in Phuket, Thailand. Apologies if anyone has been trying to contact me without luck, my phone would not let me update my messages.
I made a special effort not to make too much effort, this had long been scheduled as a ‘meet the family again after an intensive two months on the book‘ trip. The plan was to make like this Gecko and flop in the light and warmth. There were a few natural navigation treats that had me scrambling for the camera and they will pop up here in time…
Welcome to the home of natural navigation on the Internet.
Natural navigation is the art of being able to find your way solely by using nature. It encompasses using the sun, moon, stars, weather, water, land, sea, plants and animals.
The Natural Navigator is the school set up by Tristan Gooley to research and teach natural navigation. It is also the title of his book on the subject.
If you would like to know more about natural navigation you can browse the website, read about Tristan’s natural navigation book, or listen to a BBC Radio 4 interview with Tristan.
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