The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Last night I divided my time between two very different arenas of the modern human experience. I watched dross on TV, including some Jonathan Dross himself, but then I found the antidote to such inanity. I nipped out regularly to put markers down in the snow, as I watched the moon’s shadows march west across the white.

I took some photos of the results of my moon shadow stick, together with a perfect north-south line, which I will be using on my Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation courses. Yes, that is a bit of a tease, but those who come on the courses part with £105 and I make sure that it includes plenty of exclusive material, not least dozens of images that cannot be seen anywhere else.

As compensation, I have posted these photos that I also took yesterday, of snow clinging in long thin strips to the…

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Only one of these compasses can be correct, since I took the photo in my garden in the south of England in April, not at the South Pole.

The stick’s shadow should tell you which compass is still accurate and also very roughly what time of day the picture was taken. Which compass is still working, why and when was the picture taken?

The answers will appear here after a few tantalising days!

…and he was high in the sky, which reminded me of one of the simplest and most beautiful of natural navigational celestial techiques. Orion is a great help in finding East or West, but there is a method for finding direction that works even if you have no idea what object you are looking at in the sky. It takes time to apply accurately, but it can be used anywhere in the world and applies to all the stars, the moon, the sun and all the planets – even if you have no idea which one you are looking at.

The moment a celestial object reaches its highest point in the sky it will be due north or south. Simples! As those meerkats like to say. Well, the principle is beautifully simple, but the practice is a bit more involved. Hence the use of shadow sticks, and sextants for that…

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An engaging group for the Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation course at the Royal Geographical Society yesterday. Diverse in age and interests as always. When we were discussing the difference in the sun’s behaviour between the solstices and equinox it felt more poignant that we are so close to the autumnal equinox itself. We looked at a model of the Earth orbiting the sun, then shifted our attention to shadows. A couple of days ago I took advantage of the sunshine to practice what I preach.

This chalk line in this picture shows the shadow tips joined over a period of a few hours on the morning of the 21st September. The line comes very close to a straight line, but even on the equinox it is never a perfectly straight line – unless you happen to be standing on the equator when the sun would rise due east, pass…

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The last course stirred up some healthy discussion about the difference between the sun’s summer and winter arcs in the sky. The arcs are actually very similar, because they are parallel, but in our winter the arc is displaced to the south. However, the effect this has on shadows is more interesting and beguiling. The arc traced by shadows over the year are not parallel, but change quite significantly from summer to winter. This is because the sun rises north of us in summer and south of us in winter. The effect this has on shadows is quite counter-intuitive, but no less fascinating for it. The chalk line in this photo shows how the shadow from the edge of a flower tub moved this morning. In the summer it would have curved the other way and closer to the pot.