The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

A blog of two halves for you today.

Late September can bring some of the best early evening experiences for those who enjoy looking upwards.

Visibility is likely to fluctuate a bit, but it looks as though we may get some of the best stargazing weather of the year over the next few nights. It promises to be warm enough to enjoy long spells outside, but without the crazily late sunsets of midsummer.

I’ll point out a few of the things worth looking for in a minute, but first just a few words about this weather.

On my courses I encourage people to take note of shifts in wind direction and how this relates to changes in weather patterns. If the weather is unseasonably warm or cold, we should expect some deviation from the prevailing wind direction, southwest.

The image above shows the UK (at lunchtime tomorrow) sandwiched neatly between…

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Sometimes I feel like a big game hunter. Not a very good one though, as the idea of shooting the last white rhino, or whatever poor soul is struggling to cling onto their mortal coil, fills me with as much horror as you might hope.

What I mean is that I often find myself creeping about rather stealthily, for fear of disturbing the animals (sometimes these animals are the kids who I dare not wake up too early for fear, in the words of Russell Crowe in Gladiator, of ‘unleashing hell’).

I move out and forward, toes on grass, silently caressing my Canon SLR in my hands like a rifle and then I wait. I wait for the Big Game.

This game is rarely actually an animal, more often it will be some unexpected quirk in nature’s portfolio.

This morning I made my way over a fence, and into the…

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I hesitated before posting this. Working in a slightly unusual field I do have to guard against publishing anything that could be deemed ‘unreliable’.

And, no, I must emphasise that it is not anywhere near April 1st, before continuing…

I would genuinely like the help of a photographer, astronomer or ufologist to try and solve a mystery.

This morning I was taking some photographs of Venus, when I noticed what appeared to be a small white smudge near the planet itself.

In the first picture (viewed on the LCD panel on the back of my camera) I noted it and thought it must have been refraction or some other light/lens phenomenon.

When the next photo showed the same ‘smudge’ to have moved slightly it was a little intriguing. When subsequent photos showed it to be moving steadily I became convinced that it was not an effect but an object of…

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Venus and the brighter stars, like Arcturus, appeared shrouded in a veil this morning.

This was not mist close to the ground – horizontal visibility was excellent – but thin layers of high cirrus clouds. This effect has been used by navigators and travellers the world over as a sign that the a front may be approaching and a weather change is likely.

Cirrus on its own is not a guarantee of anything, but when followed, as it so often is, by cirrostratus and altostratus it is a strong indicator of an approaching warm front.

In my book I give the example of the frequent Greenland traveller, Gretel Ehrlich, who noted during a dog sled trip with a local hunter that a ring circling the sun in the morning signalled bad weather. Similar examples are to be found in deserts, on Pacific islands and among students of weather…

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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.

The frost crunched under the Ugg boots this morning and the cold crept in under the ridiculous hat as I helped myself to views of the waning moon, Sirius and Venus. In this picture Venus can be seen just above the contrail.

You may also just be able to see a star to the right of Venus and slightly higher. This is Spica in the constellation Virgo. Minutes after this picture was taken Spica had disappeared from view, drowned in the dawn’s growing light. Venus would not be bullied so easily from the sky and remained beacon bright. This is one of the easiest ways of telling that you are looking at a planet, they are usually the first to arrive and the last to leave the night party.

Saturn was visible earlier on, higher in the eastern sky than Venus or Spica, but is far from its brightest at…

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I returned from a family trip to Brittany yesterday and what better welcome back than to come downstairs this morning to find Jupiter beaming at me through a skylight. It is a firm fixture in the early morning sky now and consequently is being confused by many for Venus. If a bright white object is visible when it is too light to see many stars then you are likely looking at Jupiter or Venus, and if the sun is more than fifty degrees away (five extended fist-widths) then that narrows it to Jupiter. This is an exercise you only need to do irregularly since it will appear in the same part of the sky at the same time for many days.

Since Venus is relatively close to the sun and is only visible as a bright object when the sun is below the horizon, it follows that Venus is normally…

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I quickly reached for my camera when I saw these objects in the sky. The picture was taken without a tripod and so they are a little blurred, but it is still just possible to make out the lights. A few seconds later the sky looked completely different and this could lead to suspicions that something unusual was going on, perhaps even stir suspicions of UFOs. The true explanation is very straightforward.

The bright light to the left of the picture is an aircraft turning towards the camera with its landing lights on. The bright light near the top of the picture is Venus. There is a fainter light, barely perceptible amongst the edges of the top part of the cloud and this is Mercury. A few seconds later the aircraft had turned fully and effectively disappeared from view and Mercury had disappeared behind a cloud making the sky appear…

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For the past few evenings I have been heading out into the Downs to find a good spot to keep watch out to the west. A sunset is always worth a walk, but there is rarer game worth hunting for in the skies at the moment. Unfortunately the clouds came in at the last minute last night and obscured Venus and Mercury again.

Such a shame, it would have been an unusually good opportunity to catch them going to bed together. Fear not, I have a near foolproof plan for spotting them and shall report back with my results. If, over the next few days, you do catch a clear sky and setting sun, hold tight and wait for the two bright beacons that will follow the sun down.

There was a review of the book in Easter’s Sunday Telegraph.

Yesterday afternoon I threw the snow off the Land Rover and headed out into the white – I had about half-a-dozen minor outstanding ‘to-do’s for the book, but there is no point writing a book about natural navigation if you are the sort of person who can resist these conditions. Dressed in a suitably ridiculous balaclava I made my way to the foot of Halnaker Hill and then proceeded uphill in wellies. Unless I’m on a mountain I find wellington boots with two pairs of socks the ideal footwear for small excursions in snow, even good hill-walking boots let some moisture in eventually, but wellies do at least stay dry even if it means slipping about a bit in places.

A roe deer jumped across the path in front of me as I climbed the hill and there was the red breast of a robin waiting on the branch…

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