NavList:

On my last trans-dimensional voyage, I visited a Universe where all the planet names in Star Trek are "real". Here's a photo of my interstellar shuttle crashed on the beach of an alien, unexplored planet. This is Ceti Alpha Five!!

Clearly I need rescue. Expert celestial navigator that I am, I make some observations with a makeshift sextant, and I determine my position. Let's assume my "sextant" is accurate to a tenth of a degree, and we can also assume I have a clock, like a common watch, accurate to the nearest second. With the last power in my backup subspace radio, I send a message into the void: "Crashed on the fifth planet of star SAO 110920. Latitude 22.60°N, Longitude 93.90°W. Send help!!" 

Now back to reality, sort of. What part of this could make sense as an emergency navigation message if you found yourself on an alien planet? And what part would not make sense? Could I make observations to determine my position like this? Could I determine my latitude and longitude? What sort of positional information could I send that would be useful to my rescuers?

Pretty image, right? It's a "prompt-generated" image using the new "A.I." tool in Adobe Acrobat. I asked it for a photo-like image of a "spacecraft crashed on a beach by an ocean on an alien planet, in twlight with stars in the sky." Not bad... It took all of sixty seconds to plan and generate.

Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island on planet Earth

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