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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Bill Lionheart
Date: 2025 Mar 19, 16:55 +0000
Bill
Re: Photo challenge: what is your latitude?
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2025 Mar 19, 09:19 -0700Looks like Luc Van den Borre and Robert H. van Gent have puzzled it out! So here's my solution as simulated in Stellarium (see the image below).
Latitude about 38.0° +/-1°. The Sidereal Time is about 11h30m or equivalently LHA Aries is 172.5° +/-3°.Regarding my clues, yes, h&χ is another name for the "double cluster" in Perseus. That was the first thing that I decided I could, just maybe, recognize in the image. With effort, I soon spotted the stars of Cassiopeia, though Schedar is behind the house. Notice that three significant stars are just outside the image frame. Capella is off to the left. Deneb is just beyond the lower right corner. And, yes, Polaris is just above the center of the image. We are facing north.
Beyond the astronomical evidence... the land is flat. The old house --maybe an old farm house?-- looks like the area has seen better days economically. The lights of distant small towns dotting the horizon look like farm country. Assuming the photo is somewhere in the USA (as a guess), then along that latitude, Kansas fits, or the adjacent plains area in eastern Colorado.
Frank Reed
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