Hi Art, I agree totally. I provided the reference to the Survival Manual because it demonstrated how much you can learn by carefully observing and measuring with minimal equipment, the motions of the sun and stars. I am continually amazed at what this interest in sundials and the correspondence on this mailing list has taught me.
Roger Bailey At 09:31 AM 5/14/99 -0700, Arthur Carlson wrote: > >I'm willing to (brashly) bet there was never a pilot who ever used these >techniques or even took them seriously. Knowing your latitude and longitude >without a map is useless, and if you have a map it is a lot easier and >quicker to find your location from the terrain. If you can't find your >location from the terrain because everything looks alike, an estimate of >your latitude and longitude will not help much either. Mountains or rolling >hills, possibly even forests, are likely to make a measurement of the length >of the day too inexact to be useful. The only thing that is truly useful is >finding directions, but then you should pack a compass, not a sextant. (That >isn't to say none of this is "fascinating".) > >I do think being able to look at the sun and estimate directions could be >useful (in case you forgot to pack a compass, shame on you!). On my list of >things I would like to do and know how to go about but haven't found the >time is to investigate telling directions from the moon. I read an article >in the magazine of the German Alpine Club a few years ago on this topic and >found it incredible. With a Ph.D. in physics I think I can figure out how >many hours to add or subtract in which direction to convert moon position to >sun position and then to direction, but I bet very few people dumb enough to >get lost at night without a compass can. But even without a watch, if you >see the moon rising, you know that's east. And if the shadow is oriented >straight up and down, then the moon is in the south. You don't need to know >much more than that to find the nearest road. > >--Art Carlson > >
