Why use Celestial Navigation?

[Tony]

I know that we’ve had a couple of threads on here about celestial navigation, but is it something we should still worry about learning and passing on to our children? In this day and age of gadgets the world has become a much smaller place, how often do we need to look up into the sky and say….”ahh, that’s there, that’s over there, so this is the way to go” Ahs it a practical use or do we learn it because it’s an old skill?

 

[TheViking]

Learning how to find north with the Big Dipper is useful IMO and something i teach everybody when I get the chance. A GPS can fail or run out of batteries, and thats a fact, cause it's electronics. The star method will never fail.

 

[steve a]

Funnily enough, and I really don't know the reason for this, but whenever I'm out overnight and the cloud cover permits, I always orientate myself by the north star. I always carry a compass, have a compass on my suunto,and yet ,it's the stars for me. If i'm doing map work then of course I would use the compass but just to orientate myself to the area the stars are accurate enough and need only a glance upwards. Just feels right.

 

[Doc]

Direction finding/orientation using Polaris is pretty essential and should be in everyone's repertoire, I think.

Actually working out your latitude and longitude with sextant, watch, almanac etc is rather different - quite tricky at sea and even more so on land. Not many people can do it. I admire those who can.

You can get your approximate latititude by measuring the angle of Polaris to the horizon. You could use a compass and a straight edge, or a protractor. If your compass has a clinometer it's a doddle. Of course, if you are one degree out...thats sixty nautical miles of error, IIRC correctly.

 

[Keith_Beef]

Portable GPS gadgets are OK until the batteries fail. Or the units gets dropped and broken. Or until the satelites are switched off (but maybe Galileo will be less prone to downgrading).

A compass is great, until you break or lose it.

Polaris is reliable; always there and always indicating true North. But it's sometimes hidden by the clouds, and you can't see it in the daytime.

Supposedly, pointing the hour hand of your watch to the sun will find south for you (half the angle between the hour hand and the minute hand). But this doesn't work so well on cloudy days, when the sun'd light is so diffused that you can't even use shadows to find out where the sun is.

What I'm getting at, is that there is no "ultimate best way". It's good to know more than one way to skin a cat.

Keith.

 

[Chip Dale]

I too, have found myself draw to the skies on clear night. Having had GPS fail on me from time to time and traveled over rich iron deposits which have thrown my compass into a "useless liquid filled bubble with a floating needle" i have found solace in the fact that i can direction find, with the use of the heavens. Even if i am un-shaw of my exact location.

 

[Furface]

When growing up in Wales, I always remember looking into the night sky and knowing exactly what I was looking at.................................Clouds!! :umbrella:

Now I spend time under slightly dryer skies, I have more opportunity to appreciate the celestial bodies. As Steve A says, it's there and you don't even need to get your hands out of your pockets.

 

[arctic hobo]

Like pretty much everyone else here I think it's an essential skill, although less easy than you'd think. Finding north is fine, but if you have to go say 150 degrees it's hard to orientate yourself, especially if there are no landmarks. In the arctic we used (use?) it most of the time as with 24 hour darkness there's no reason why not, and it saves your hands for your ski sticks and rifle. Plus the further north you go the less accurate your compass is. A compass is great for backup, but in low temperatures you may find the compass fluid freezes (mine did and broke :roll. A cheap non-fluid compass is an important backup, as in the mountains you can be in cloud for weeks.
In more temperate climes a compass is of course the easiest way, and by no means un-bushcrafty: the Vikings used a "lodestone" (magnetic rock) compass for navigation.
Doc having been taught Sextants before (in fact I am qualified to teach it), I cannot see how you could use it on land. You need a perfect horizon fix - on the sea you're at sea level looking at a sea level horizon. Throw land in and you'll be all over the place! :?:

 

[Fallow Way]

why learn anything as there is a easy option for all things today?

I belive that it is enough to learn a skill if soley for keeping that skill alive, irrespective of the efficiency/recurrance of its use.

With regards to star-craft I use it every night. I dont need to rummage through my pockets to find a compass and head torch, i flick my eyes up through the canopy and know my way home.

It is the same for during the day, if i need to point someone in the right direction, i dont even need to look up from my planting, i know where the sun is and can give a pretty accurate pointer based on that.

 

[Doc]

On land you use a bubble sextant or artificial horizon, such as a bowl of mercury.

Not as handy as a GPS....!

 

[sargey]

On land you use a bubble sextant or artificial horizon, such as a bowl of mercury.

and an altimeter to adjust for your height above sea level :shock:

there're some great articles on the subject of overland exploration and early map makers available on the net. i just can't seem to find 'em at the mo'

like alot of things, the skills aren't really useable on this little island, but interesting none the less.

cheers, and.

 

[leon-1]

It's worth learning, whilst in the forces I used to take a bearing onto a star and march on it for 15 minutes, but if you take your eye of it and look back a few minutes later it is worth knowing which star in which constellation you were marching on.

It is also a fundamental skill, as is all navigation ,if you understand this then it is yet another string to your bow and breaks the stranglehold that technology seems to have on the world. As people said before technology can fail, so can stars, but stars don't have a 24hr battery life and you can't drop them.

Then of course we have the biggest of celestial objects (from our perspective) that Keith mentioned :biggthump , the sun, celestial navigation isn't just at night

 

[greg2935]

To my mind because it is easier to see at night (when cloudless obviously!) than a compass, and there is a load of folklore associated with each constellation. Also during bad sun spot activity, compasses can misalign, GPS is shut down (they shut down all satellites during ion storms to protect them), you'll see a great northen lights show though!

 

[Doc]

It's surprising how many people know nothing about astronomy/the sun. Not even that the sun rises in the east, or that the earth goes round the sun.

A bit of astronomy is useful - you better understand how days shorten, the solstice, moonstate, seasons, moon and tides, astronavigation, latitude/longitude and how it relates to time zones, degrees/minutes and nautical miles, radio propagation and the 11 year sunspot cycle. When outdoors you can see some of Jupiter's moons with even small binos, and I can just make out saturns rings with a 20x50 telescope - the sort of thing you might well carry in your outfit.

I'd like to write an article on Astronomy for the Outdoorsman but apart from the lack of time, I don't really know it well enough to teach, and my understanding is rather superficial in places.

 

[spamel]

As somebody else mentioned, there are numerous ways of finding north, some more accurately than others. I have even used moss growing on a tree to get a general direction before, although its accuracy must be questioned!

Although I think GPS are amazing inventions, and owning an old Garmin 12 aswell, I still like to use my core navigation skills, and only use GPS as a verifying tool. If you rely on GPS and it goes wrong, either due to battery failure or breakage, and you don't have a good grasp of map and compass navigation, you are screwed.

Finding north with an analogue watch is very interesting, and ensuring the watch is accurate so will your direction. Stars are good, although you have to be on top of the knowledge, there can't be any grey areas. They were used for centuries by our forefathers, and it worked for them. I would like to get a greater knowledge of celestial navigation, if anybody can send me to a good book or website, it would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Pict]

I've found most people I've talked to down here don't know you can use the Southern Cross to find due south. Its not as easy as using Polaris to find north but it works. Besides, the southern sky is amazingly beautiful at night.

I'm far enough south that Polaris is below the horizon. The Big dipper makes an appearance upsidedown and low on the horizon. Its usually only partly visible. You can make out the pointer stars and still kind of make out where the north star should be, down below a rice paddy or something. It does help to orient yourself if you've already found south using the Southern Cross. Mac

 

[R-Bowskill]

The short answer is:

Because I can.

Also it's fun and challenging. One of the few bushcraft skills that it's possible to test yourself in a quantifiable way to find out how well you're doing it. You can decide on a bearing, try finding it by the sun or stars and then use a compass to see how many degrees off you are.

In the Negev desert I found I could tell the time to within a minuite by the height of the sun above the mountains of Jordan. Which meant I didn't have to wear a watch and get the face scratched by the flinty ground I was digging.

On top of that the best places to see the sky in Britain are areas well away from towns which means they are likely to be good for bushcraft anyway. I got a nice view of the pliades with a pair of pocket 10X bino's during the East Anglia Meetup in February, didn't have to contend with the street lights where I live like I usually do with my scope.

 

[brucemacdonald]

I've got to agree with everyone here - don't knock astronavigation just because we now have magnetic compasses and GPS which are known to fail.

Our ancestors would navigate by the stars, and would measure the year by them. Astronavigation is one of our few direct links with the ancient past and for that reason alone bushcrafters should do it. And as Greg points out there are also many stories associated with the constellations.

Next time I go to Ashdown (weather permitting) I would like to bring my telescope to show people a few of the sights. The night sky is every bit a wonder of nature as the mountains, forests and lakes on Earth.

Best wishes

Bruce

 

[arctic hobo]

On top of that the best places to see the sky in Britain are areas well away from towns which means they are likely to be good for bushcraft anyway. I got a nice view of the pliades with a pair of pocket 10X bino's during the East Anglia Meetup in February, didn't have to contend with the street lights where I live like I usually do with my scope.

This is off topic but might interest some of you: I read in New Scientist a few years ago about an astronomer who went on a tour to popularise astronomy in children. He went around primary schools in New York, showing them slides of the constellations and observatories. After one of the lectures a teacher took him aside and said that she thought it best if he told the children that the slides were computer simulations. He stared back at her, baffled - they had simply been photographs from his own back garden. It transpired that neither the teacher nor any of the 60 or so pupils had ever seen the stars.

 

[steve a]

Light pollution is a major problem for a lot of people in the Uk, a few years ago a campaign was started to try and educate local authorities on the benefit of none wasteful lighting systems ie ones that throw light where people need/want it and not all over the place.

I bet not many people in the uk have seen the Milky Way or looked through a telescope and appreciated just how many stars are up there and what beauty they are missing.