The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

It is that time of year again. The sun and Jack Frost are working together to paint the land.

In this photo of a dog-mauled football, we are looking southeast. But why does the football’s shadow appear longer than the patch of frost? Surely, since the sun is rising it should be the other way round?

Useless clue: it doesn’t have anything to do with the dog, who wisely avoids footballs until they are well defrosted.

UPDATE: The patterns of frost we see as the day wears on are shaped by more than one factor.

The areas that have received direct sunlight will of course thaw faster than those that remain in the shade.

The colour of a surface has a huge effect too. Dark earth will thaw faster in the sun than light-coloured stone.

The wind also has a big impact on any day with a light breeze or…

Read More...

We may never know the exact method that the earliest explorers used to find their way, but there is a friendly finger of suspicion that gets pointed regularly at the birds.

Some of the routes used by the pioneers of the Pacific match the migratory routes of the birds exactly.

The route used by the Maori fleet that sailed from Tahiti to New Zealand sometime in the fourteenth century and settled there is the same as that taken by the Long-tailed Cuckoo each September.

I like to think of these earliest navigators. I imagine them gazing up as flocks of birds head uniformly over the horizon in one direction only to repeat the exercised in the opposite direction half a year later. It does not take great leaps of the imagination to deduce that the birds are not doing this great exercise for fun, QED, there must be something in…

Read More...

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…

Read More...

Awoke this morning and took the newest member of the family, a miniature Schnauzer puppy called Dreyfus, out for his constitutional.

Then it was time to look southeast and to watch Virgo melt back into the dawn light as Venus rose above the thin slither of a waning crescent moon. Below them pink and orange light bounced through under the dark blue sky and above the white of the hills.

My kind of music. Probably what Dreyfus was thinking too.

For much of the UK, tonight promises to be a good night for some stargazing. With a bit of luck the only clouds for many will be from our breath. The moon, which is four days off full, will outshine many of the stars but should not spoil the party.

If the sky is clear we will get a very good view of Mars in the east in the early evening. Sitting between the constellations of Leo (easy to find) and Cancer (hard to find), it will be rising about thirty degrees north of east at dusk and pass through due east at 8.30pm. By then Orion, below the high moon, will have moved to occupy a large part of the southern sky. If you follow Orion’s belt down to nearer the horizon then low in the southeast you will see the brightest star of them…

Read More...

Venus and Sirius both beamed at me this morning during my pre-dawn shiver outside. The aircraft were painting a pink path to the continent to escape the autumnal cold. They are of course heading southeast, which I’m sure you checked from the tiny crescent of the moon. Speaking of crescents, this morning calls for a hot croissant.

Happy Summer Solstice everyone. Sunrise and sunset will be closer to north than east or west at this time of year for most of Scotland.

This photo is taken looking southeast. The setting sunlight can be seen bouncing off the northwestern edges of the clouds.

This morning’s sun was a strong enough clue, but if we wanted to know which way was southeast then these aircraft contrails are pointing the way to the continent.

It looks like a particularly busy morning for aircraft, but this is just a reflection of atmospheric conditions. The hydrogen-rich jet fuel has mixed with oxygen, reacted in the engines and formed, among lots of other lovely and not so lovely things, water. In certain temperatures and humidity levels this water freezes into ice crystals. The high cirrus clouds that we normally see are also composed entirely of ice.

The length of time that a contrail survives depends on the humidity, if the air is dry it will sublimate away, but if saturated they will last as long as other cirrus clouds.

My wife and I spent nearly all the weekend on the water, which will be a rare treat until our boys are a bit older. There was lots of sun, plenty of mist and fog and not very much wind. It would have been nice to have done more sailing and less motoring, but we were ecstatic just to be out there.

In my last entry I talked about dawn and dusk colours, these two dawn pictures show the shift in colour quite nicely. There was only one minute between the two shots. Interestingly it appears to have reddened, which is not what we’d usually expect to see – ah, nature, that slippery friend!

Natural navigators will have spotted already the windswept nature of the trees on the shoreline, confirming that we are indeed looking southeast.