The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Last night I caught a few minutes of a programme on BBC4, called ‘Unnatural Histories.’

As so often seems to be the case, a short stroll from the mainstream channels uncovered rough diamonds.

In the programme, an aerial shot showed us clearly visible patterns in the earth, patterns that were partly concealed at ground level by dense undergrowth. The narrator explained that we were looking at ‘geoglyphs’ in the Amazon rainforest. Geoglyphs are shapes that have been deliberately formed in the land by the hand of man.

Like many pilots, I have come to love the way it is possible in the air to spot patterns in the earth that are hard to notice on the ground. Lines that are lost in their surroundings on terra firma, stand out luminously from 3000 feet. But my experience has been restricted to European Iron Age Hill Forts and the like. This was…

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Happy Winter Solstice One and All!

Here’s an interesting solstice fact for you: the Earth is actually receiving more solar radiation at this time of year than at any other time. This is because the Earth does not orbit the sun in a circle, but in an ellipse. In the northern hemisphere winter the Earth is at its closest to the sun, a point called ‘perihelion’, but in summer it is at its furthest point, or ‘aphelion’.

The Guardian have published a little article on the timing of the winter solstice.

However, my favourite solstice image is on a different page. The same technique used in the photo on that page, from the same position, but on the summer solstice would probably not catch the sun at all, or perhaps just a glimpse of it in the top corners.

At this time of year the sun is always…

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As promised, here is a more detailed update on my short time in Oman last week. My main reason for being there was to train the Omani Outward Bound instructors. In the short time available I wanted to give them a decent understanding of how to use nature’s clues to find their way in the desert. Just as importantly, I needed to give them the techniques and knowledge they could pass onto their future students.

We started with theory indoors at the offices of Outward Bound Oman, with the help of planetarium software and makeshift whiteboards (paper Sellotaped to a cupboard). After three hours of theory, it was time to head out in 4x4s for a 3 hour drive into the desert, for some more practical training.

We tracked the sun down to the horizon and confirmed that it had indeed set a good 15 degrees south of west.…

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OK, it’s confession time. Again.

I’m just back from a week’s holiday with my wife on the Greek island of Kefalonia. It was our first holiday without the kids for about seven years, which felt bizarre from start to finish. This is the only, admittedly weak, excuse for the navigational lapse that ensued.

In Fiskardo, at the northern end of Kefalonia, we hired a small day-boat and spent many mornings motoring up and down the east coast of Kefalonia. We pursued the not very stressful business of hunting quiet bays and seeking secluded beaches for a swim.

On the fifth morning we putt-putted all the way round the northern Kefalonian coast to a beach at the northern tip of the island called, Dafnoudi beach.

We had spent almost all of the week on the east coast of the Kefalonia looking across the water, to the east, and seeing the beautiful…

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Thomas Manning (1772-1840) was an eccentric academic and the first British traveller to reach Tibet. After donning a heavy disguise and much perseverance and patience he finally met the Dalai Lama, who was only seven years old at the time.

An excerpt from his account of his travels is a good reminder of how much better connected the travellers of old were to the incestuous relationship between the sun, time and direction.

We hurried into the town where we were to change
horses, but our haste was fruitless. There we were obliged to wait
until our baggage came up long, long after us, and until it was
adjusted upon fresh cattle. If we now had galloped all the way to
Lhasa the sun would have been in the south before we could have
been in the august presence of the Tagin. This was exceeding
discomfort to my Munshi, but great

…

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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.

I was just ‘tweeted’ by Anne who had spotted what initially appeared to be an unusual light phenomenon appearing in some cirrus clouds. I think it is just a small arc of a standard ‘primary rainbow’, but part of me desperately wanted it to be a ‘fire rainbow’ which I have never knowingly seen.

Fire rainbows (see photo) are very rare and form in cirrus ice crystals at high altitudes; their coloured arcs are near horizontal and parallel to the horizon. Fire rainbows can only come into being if the sun and atmospheric conditions meet very stringent criteria, another of nature’s beautiful balancing acts. There is more background to these extraordinary light shows on the National Geographic website.

As this website explains, fire rainbows can only occur when the sun is high enough in the sky (58 degrees or more) and sadly that rules them out from…

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Happy Equinox All!

At nine minutes past three this morning, GMT, the sun was overhead the equator.  To celebrate, here are a few things that you may or may not know about the equinox. Only one of them is not true.

The sun will rise due east and set due west for everyone today.

The direction (bearing) of sunrise and sunset changes by more each day at this time of year than at any other time.

On the December side of the equinoxes the sun is always overhead the southern hemisphere, on the June side it is always overhead the northern hemisphere.

Everyone on the planet shares an equal length day and night on the equinoxes.

Satellites that appear stationary and stay over the same spot on the Earth’s surface are called geostationary or geosynchronous and they remain in orbit over the equator. As the sun passes over the equator…

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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…

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BBC Devon have a delightful story about the sculptor, Marcus Vergette, on their section of the BBC website.

Marcus is sculpting a series of ‘tidal bells’ that will ring out at high tide around the country. There is no mention of springs or neaps in the article, so I’m presuming the bells are being placed low enough to ring at a neap tide (the narrowest range between high and low).

In the book I touch on the fact that humans have become very adept at approximating tidal behaviour, but it is still impossible to predict tidal times or heights with absolute precision. The tides are influenced by the orbits of the Moon about the Earth of course, but also very significantly by the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, which fewer people realise. These are the factors that are relatively easy to predict. The effects of…

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