21 December 2009 by Tristan Gooley
This is not the glorious image of the winter solstice sunrise that I had been planning for you. Events conspired against that.
The original plan had been to drive up to a semi-secret location in the South Downs and take a picture of the sun rising in what were originally forecast to be clear cold skies.
Yesterday morning I was driving the four miles from home to the gym but all four wheels of the Land Rover Defender lost traction on black ice and I slid headfirst into a substantial tree at about 25 miles-per-hour. I walked away from the car-and-tree amalgamation and felt very lucky to be in much better shape than either. My next thought was that my wife and kids were due to set out on the same road an hour after I had. My mobile phone was on charge at home. I ended up having to run home,…
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Tags: gps, land rover, maps, off road snow, south downs, sunrise, winter solstice |
21 June 2009 by Tristan Gooley
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.

Tags: scotland, southeast, summer solstice, sunrise, sunset |
26 November 2008 by Tristan Gooley


Dawn is a critical and exciting time for the natural navigator, it sets up the day. It is also a time of rapid change, I took the second of these two photographs only one hour after the first yesterday morning, but that need not catch us off guard.
With experience it is possible to tell that this moon is two days off a new moon, which means that it will rise two of my fist-widths (24 degrees) ahead of the sun. The sun travels through the sky at just over a full fist width (15 degrees) an hour. It was therefore possible for me to gauge that the sun would rise in about one and half hours just by looking at the low moon in a dark sky.
Tags: dawn, natural navigation, new moon, sunrise |