NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Brian Walton
Date: 2019 Jul 2, 21:46 -0700
David,
Azimuths, or getting your bearings. If you are in the N Hemisphere and go out tonight, the first stars to come out will possiby be Arcturus towards the west, and Vega (part of the Summer Triangle) very high up. LOPTSA. So Scorpio must be between the two you can see, and Pegasus is coming up, over to the left.
Up in the sky, for northerners, Orion is left of Pegasus, and Leo is right of Arcturus, but both now below the horizon. That’s why I do the acronym that way round.
When I learnt to night fly, it was possible to set the compass verge ring 180° out, and align heading gyros dot on cross, or red on blue.
As an aside, if you fly airliners westwards at high enough latitudes, the stars can go “backwards.”
I hope my LOPTSA will help some forum readers get the right way up, sometime, I write this lying in my sea berth,
Regards
Brian
