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 perfect for stars.

The solution, it dawned on me (pehaps I should say dusked?) is to create a club for those who are interested and then, when the conditions are right I will let everyone know where and when I will be for a couple of hours of guided stargazing. There will be no charge – as there will be no guarantees – but I should be able to give a couple of days notice in most cases and less in a few. Most of these will take place in the South Downs in West Sussex, but I will also endeavour to host a couple of nights when out and about in other parts of the UK or perhaps, in time, abroad. All you need to do to join this club is to come on one of my courses, public or private.

Last night the visibility was great and we enjoyed the nearly full moon, Gemini, Pegasus, Taurus, the Plough, the North Star, Cassiopeia, Jupiter, Cygnus, Auriga, Orion and probably quite a few others! In total we looked at five different ways of finding north from the stars and many other techniques for finding direction.

I took the picture of the moon above last night. It is full today and so was one day off full last night, but it does look quite full. It goes to show how tricky it can be to tell the difference between phases precisely. Everyone can get very close, but I do not know of anyone in the world who can, without fail, gauge the phase of the moon to the day just by looking at it. This has implications for using the slightly involved ‘phase method’ of finding direction (see the book), as for each day you are out in your estimation of the moon’s phase this can throw your estimation of direction out by 12 degrees.

Here is a bit of a red herring from a navigation point of view, but fun all the same… When I was going through my photos this morning I was about to delete an unsteady one of Jupiter (the second one shown here), when I hesitated because I spotted something that jumped out at me. Below the bright Jupiter and in a crooked line there are four stars, but just above them and to the right of Jupiter there is a very small blue smudge. This, as I hoped and suspected, was Uranus. It was not visible to the naked eye last night, but showed up on the longer exposure of this photo. A lovely small ‘discovery’ to start the day with. Not sure my name will go down there with Herschel’s though!

My thanks to Kevan Hubberd for sending in the idea about using Orion’s Sword as a way of finding south.

Orion’s Sword can be seen in the image to the left as the short vertical line of ‘stars’ under Orion’s Belt.

The Sword does indeed point to a spot on the horizon that is close to due south when the Sword is near vertical (as in this image), but it is a less dependable guide when it is well off-vertical, ie. when it is lower in the sky.

Technical bit for natural navigation zealots only: The reason that the Sword is more accurate when vertical is that it makes a line in the sky that is parallel to the line towards the south celestial pole. When vertical this line intersects with the horizon at a point very close to due south, but at times when the sword is closer to the horizon, ie. closer to east or west, then the point of intersection will also mover closer to east or west respectively. The extreme would be the moment when the sword rises in the east or sets in the west.

Bonus trivia: The Orion Nebula, a region of massive star formation, can be seen as the bright orange ball that forms the middle of the three ‘stars’ of the sword. NB. It is not the huge bright orange star to the top left, that is Orion’s shoulder and is called Betelgeuse or ‘Beetlejuice’, from the Arabic words for ‘giant’s shoulder’.

It was possible to tell if I strayed off a path without any light at all, by the feel of the soft grass against the icy crunch of the path, ie. by using hearing and touch. A lot of wayfinding revolves around sight, but it adds greatly to the satisfaction when the other senses come into play.