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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I took this picture a few minutes ago. For those of you interested in these sorts of cloudscapes then here is a good tip for finding them:

Take a really keen interest in the sky whenever bad weather is forecast after a good spell. Don’t wait for the change to become obvious though, the interesting higher clouds: the wispy cirrus, mares’ tails, mackerel skies etc. will all be found just before most people notice that the weather is changing, so you need to remain aware.

It works the other way round too of course, if you don’t have access to forecasts, or prefer to do your own, then this sort of sky after settled weather is a strong sign that a big change is on its way. More tips on weather lore here.

(There should be a great opportunity to see some moonlit cloudscapes tonight hopefully too.)

Just saw and managed to snap a beautiful 22 degree moon halo. They are caused by the moon’s light refracting through the ice crystals in the high clouds. In this case almost certainly thin cirrus clouds which are presaging the arrival of bad weather. Halos are not the same as moonbows, although they are often called that in error.

Will write more about them tomorrow if I get the chance, but wanted to get the photo up while I could.

We had some old friends staying this weekend and decided to laugh in the general direction of the forecasts and go for a walk in the woods. It was dry for half an hour, but then the clouds moving over our heads, and visible in the gaps between the near-bare trees, changed their scudding direction by almost ninety degrees. This was the starting gun for a predicted and yet sudden change in our weather fortunes. We turned at our halfway point, the 18th century Nore Folly perched at the edge of the woods and looking out over Slindon and the south coast. The rain came down hard, and then harder still and then the hail came too. The upside of such weather is that you don’t have to be cold and wet for long before you feel you have earned a three course Sunday lunch and hours spent reading…

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The two pictures above show two sides of the same bridleway signpost on the South Downs Way. The arrows both point east and there is a clue to this in the photos. It is not in the lichen growth, which unusually is quite similar on both sides, but in the colour of the arrows themselves. The blue of the south-facing (but east-pointing!) arrow has been bleached more by the sun. The three main weathering clues are sun, wind and rain. The first will usually be greatest on the southern side, but wind and rain will usually leave their marks more prominently on the southwestern side.