NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2024 Mar 26, 21:46 -0700
There's a Netflix science fiction series getting decent reviews right now. Its first episode ends with the stars blinking in code. Characters in the show are pretty excited about that! Two of them observe this phenomenon at a spot called Tom Quad at Oxford University (I know this only from poking around briefly online). Blinking stars? Yeah, that's weird. Did someone finish typing out the nine billion names of god? But set aside the blinking stars... There's more trouble here among the stars above Oxford. Can you estimate your latitude from this image, attached below? Ignore problems with azimuth for the moment. How many navigation stars can you count? What is the latitude implied by the stars in this sky, and how far is that from Oxford? Also, you might wonder how much of a power failure might have occurred since there's an awful lot of stars visible. In fact, I estimate the limiting magnitude is around 9.5 or deeper. That's a dark sky...
Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA
