Cats and Hats

Those who have been on a course will know the strange pleasure that I get from connecting seemingly unrelated things through natural navigation, so here, before your eyes I will attempt to connect a cat on a dustbin and a Greek orthodox priest.

The Gooleys have just returned from a week visiting family in the Peloponnese. My brother's house is high in the Greek hills and we found ourselves following the same route down a few times each day on the way to towns, villages or the beach. It was during these trips in the car that I noticed that certain animals and indeed, in the case of one Greek orthodox priest, people appeared with a soothing predictability at certain points on the journey.

There was a corner that I remembered well for the dustbin which invariably had this cat sitting on it, and the turning to the beach was nearly always to be found a few hundred yards after we saw a priest walking by the road. There is no denying that this is an odd way to view a journey to us in the West, but to the traditional Pacific navigators it would have been comforting and familiar. They included among their many methods of finding their way to the next island, the art of 'pookof', noting which sea creatures appeared with dependable regularity in which locations as they approached land. A school of dolphins a few hours south of one island, a couple of turtles a day east of another.

My long-suffering family even had to endure me saying things like, 'Shall we head towards the priest and then turn towards the pookof cat and go for a swim in the sea?' They must be delighted to be home.

Never Ending Story

The incestuous relationship between the stars and mythology is nothing new, but we often overlook how constantly the relationship is rekindled or how fresh some of the stories are. The following paragraph is from Emily Winterburn's entertaining new book, 'The Stargazer's Guide'.

'In Orion these [stars] are Rigel, Betelgeuse and Bellatrix; in Canis Major there is Sirius - and even Canis Minor, which essentially consists of only two stars, has the very bright Procyon. These are familiar names, but not perhaps for astronomical reasons. Bellatrix and Sirius are probably better known now as characters in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, while Betelgeuse was the title of a Tim Burton film, albeit with a different spelling [Beetlejuice].

Millennium Mist

On Sunday morning, when sailing off the south coast, visibility came down to a few hundred metres at times. The sun played some of its usual tricks in the fog and one that I don't think I've seen before. When looking down-sun it created a colourless rainbow-like arch with pure white underneath, it was very like sailing past the Millennium Dome, or whatever it's called these days. At one point there was one visible when looking towards the sun as well, it felt like sailing between two domes. Surreal.

We were out of sight of land for most of the morning even though it was no more than a couple of miles away for a lot of the time. A small bird (Tit, Warbler?) landed for a brief inspection of some of the ropes, which was comforting and reassured me that we were still within reach of land!

Amaizing Awareness, Corngratulations!

Regular readers may recall how my chilli plants demonstrated an aversion to wind and cold. Yesterday I spent a full and enjoyable day with some of the team from Sire Technology, who were braving the Pathfinder course.

The day consists of an intense morning of indoor training followed by a good leg stretch in the South Downs. Part of the morning is spent going through a few exercises aimed at awakening the senses and raising awareness. I was delighted therefore when, during the afternoon's practical exercise, Barry from Sire pointed out something that I had walked past without noticing several times. The photo is taken looking northeast and the corn that is being shielded from the sun's rays by the trees to the left of the picture is fairing a lot worse than that to the right.

On a tangent... Before writing this post I thought that I would try to solve something that has, in a very small way, mystified me for years. I wanted to know what the difference was between the words 'maize' and 'corn'. I spent ten minutes trying to find the answer on the internet and am now much more confused than I was before. Something to do with American Indians, apparently, maybe. Answers on a postcard please. Sorry about the post's title by the way.

Unamused

If you thought that you might escape with only one blog posting after two days at sea, then you were mistaken. I'll restrain myself and add just one more for now. This is my wife, Sophie, looking a touch unamused at this version of sailing. I think her idea is more Mediterranean, perhaps even cocktails and Caribbean. Not motoring through a cold October mist in the dark.

A Rare Treat and a Slippery Friend

My wife and I spent nearly all the weekend on the water, which will be a rare treat until our boys are a bit older. There was lots of sun, plenty of mist and fog and not very much wind. It would have been nice to have done more sailing and less motoring, but we were ecstatic just to be out there.

In my last entry I talked about dawn and dusk colours, these two dawn pictures show the shift in colour quite nicely. There was only one minute between the two shots. Interestingly it appears to have reddened, which is not what we'd usually expect to see - ah, nature, that slippery friend!

Natural navigators will have spotted already the windswept nature of the trees on the shoreline, confirming that we are indeed looking southeast.

Subtle shades

A fresh peach of a dawn this morning. The contrails in the first photo have a clear southeast track to them which is not unexpected as there's lots of civilisation to the distant southeast of Sussex and relatively little in other distant directions.

Dawn light always feels very different to sunset light. I use the word feel deliberately, because the actual light and colour differences are often subtle. Even if they look similar our normal sleep patterns and lifestyles, combined with the temperature differences mean that we rarely look at a sunset and dawn with similar sensations. If we are in a familiar place we know where to expect morning or evening light, but even mid-Atlantic robbed of lots of other stimuli they feel massively different, one heralding an end to cold and the other respite from sweltering.

But do they actually look different? Yes. The familiar pinks, oranges and reds can often be found more intensely at sunset than at dawn, but why? The colours of both dawn and sunset are caused by the light travelling through more of the earth's atmosphere at the start and end of the day, which leads to the colours not at the red end of the spectrum being scattered - effectively filtered out. How does that make sunset different in appearance from dawn? Well the early evening air is different to the early morning air, it is warmer, more turbulent and there are more dust and pollutant particles in it. These factors combine to accentuate the filtering effect and so sunsets often appear redder than sunrises.

Archaeoastronomy in Mexico

My thanks to David Higham who attended a course last Saturday and sent in this image of the Caracol Observatory Tower at Chichen Itza and also for drawing my attention to the fact that the later additions are aligned differently, possibly accounting for the need to track different celestial objects or even for differences due to the precession of the equinoxes.

Big Dipper Birds

I was enjoying the view down a misty valley this morning when a flock of gulls went overhead. I took a quick photo and had low expectations of its quality. As you can see it is not going to win any awards, but the faint shape of an upside down Big Dipper did stare back at me when I downloaded the pictures. Signs, signs everywhere, but what do they all mean?

Sirius, Canopus and Camels

A good morning for the stars, but a bit damper in West Sussex than camels would like. Still, no reason not to enjoy an excerpt from Clinton Bailey's 1974 article about Bedouin Star Lore:

Even in the late twentieth century many Bedouin are familiar with Polaris
(called al-Jidi) and Canopus (Suhayl), the two stars that indicate the directions
north and south. When a Bedouin, composing a poem, wanted to relate that
he was travelling south-east, for example, he said:
'Ahutt al-Jidi 'ald wirk il-matiyyah
W'adhrT naharhd 'an Suhayl al-yimain'

'I put Polaris on the thigh of my mount
While shielding her throat from Canopus south '.

A Meeting of Minds

One of my secret hopes when launching the beginner's courses was that it would attract a varied gang. I am delighted to be able to write that the early indications are very promising. Those walking away with a certificate already include a submariner and Royal Navy officer as well as a brace of desert-crossers, holidaymakers, engineers and writers.

This really adds to the day as everyone's varying backgrounds and experiences allow them to offer fresh perspectives on new and familiar territory. It also means that the learning never stops for me too. On the course last Saturday I learnt something new about the ancient observatory at Chichen Itza in Mexico and found out about the Geochron clock, which shows in real time the areas of earth that are in light and dark.

Go South

Twilight at either end of the day is a good time to look south this month. At dusk Jupiter is the first night object to appear, narrowly but clearly, above the southern horizon. This morning at sunrise Sirius was the last object to disappear, again it was due south. I took these two pictures at 6.30am, one looking east showing the red dawn. The other looking south. It is not a fascinating photo of Sirius but it does at least show that there is nothing else visible around it.

On a tangent, the expression 'go south' is often used to mean something is past its best. 'Tottenham seem to have gone south under Ramos' influence.' In the US it was more usually 'gone west', but even there south seems to be winning through. If you are something of a verbal sleuth there is a thorough tour of these expressions here.