The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

I woke very early this morning and felt restless so headed into the Downs for a walk. I listened to the Shipping Forecast in the car on the way, feeling instantly integrated into the fragmented dawn community of fishermen and farmers.

There were some spectacular sights as the sun rose and fought back the mist over the Arun Valley. The views were filled with colour experiments too as the pinks and oranges of the sky rose in a crescendo that battled with the whites and greens closer to the ground. In the end the orange clashed too grossly with the yellows of a field of rapeseed and I had to look away.

Yesterday afternoon I received the following email from a young navigator called Luke Hardy:

This Saturday, just gone, myself and two friends went on our local walking competition – the Charnwood Hike.  The aim is to complete the 20 mile hike…

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Happy Spring Equinox!

My plans this morning, as announced in the Telegraph, were to head to the top of a hill and catch the sun rising due east. Sadly, the air is cooler than its dewpoint… the humidity is greater than 100%… there is a low level of nimbostratus… however you want to put it: the weather is not very good and the visibility is terrible.

Had I been able to see the sun it would have risen due east. The vernal and autumnal equinoxes being the only two days of the year when the sun rises due east.

Something that you cannot notice on any individual day, but only by studying the sun’s rising position over the course of a year from the same location, is that its rising and setting positions are changing by more at this time of year than at any other time. Near the solstices the sunrise position…

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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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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.

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.