Improve your navigation skills before you need them!

Many animals are able to navigate using the Sun as a compass. Animals use a relationship between the position of the sun in the sky and their own internal clock to orientate themselves.  Many animals including hatch-ling turtles use the moon for orientation.  You may have seen the sad footage of turtles on Planet Earth, fatally choosing the wrong direction as city light pollution is now brighter than the moon causing the turtles to march in the wrong direction. 



We humans no longer possess these natural abilities and in the age of GPS we are also losing the ability to read a map or use a compass.  There are many places online and many different methods to learn how to navigate using the sun, moon, stars and even how trees and plants grow can indicate direction. 

• How to use a compass on wikiHOW
• How to read a map Beginners Guide
• How to navigate with the sun
• How to navigate using the moon
• How to navigate using the stars: Celestial Navigation
• How to navigate using trees and plants

Here, Jason Ingamells of Woodland Ways, gives some simple tips on orientation using the sun.

The sun’s path through the sky is completely predictable and if we become familiar with its movements it can be used to navigate quite accurately. So what is its path through the sky?  Ask most people and they will say it rises in the east, passes overhead at noon and sets in the west but there are several inaccuracies in this statement.

Because of the tilt of the earth and our latitude in this country the sun only ever rises exactly east and sets exactly west on the spring and autumn equinoxes.  On the summer solstice it actually rises almost north-east and sets north-west, whilst on the winter solstice it rises roughly south-east and sets south west.  The same factors (tilt and latitude) also mean the sun never actually passes directly overhead but is always to the south of us even in midsummer. There are also slight variations in the spin of the earth which mean that the sun isn’t always at its highest point at exactly noon as one would imagine, it can actually by up to about 15 minutes before or after noon when it’s at its highest. In addition in summer by moving the clocks forward by an hour things get even more complicated.

So if all this sounds confusing it can be simplified very easily. The earth always makes one complete revolution every 24 hours (give or take a minute or two) so the sun appears to move through the sky 360 degrees over the same period, so about 150 an hour.  So regardless of the time of year and even at night when you can’t see it  the sun will be approximately  north-east at 3am, east at 6am, south east at 9am, south at midday, south-west at 3pm, west at 6pm, north-west at 9pm and believe it or not north at midnight. The only thing to remember is to add an hour on during British Summertime or always work on GMT. So although this is not nearly as accurate as navigating with a compass it means that if the sun is out and you have a watch it is possible to get a good idea of direction using the sun.

If all that is a lot to remember, a quick way to get your bearings that works well between 6am and 6pm is to use your watch.  Provided your watch has hands and isn’t a digital watch (in which case simply improvise by drawing it out on a piece of paper), point the hour hand at the sun and bisect the angle between the hour hand and the 12 on the watch dial (1 during BST). This will give you a north-south line. As we know that in the UK the sun is always in the southern part of the sky between 6am and 6pm then we can find south and calculate the other cardinal points.

A more accurate way that takes a bit more time is to use a shadow stick.  Place a thin straight stick in the ground and mark where the tip of its shadow ends.  Wait a suitable period of time….the longer the better and ideally an equal time period either side of noon. The shadow will have moved as the sun has progressed through the sky, if you mark the shadow now, the two markers will give you an approximate west-east line meaning if you stand along it with your left foot nearest to the first marker and your right next to the second you should be facing due north.

To get an exact north bearing, mark the shadow every few minutes for a hour or so spanning noon (1pm in summer) and determine where the shortest shadow is. This will be when the sun was at its highest which is when it is exactly south in the sky hence the shadow will point exactly due north.