NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Greg Rudzinski
Date: 2013 May 16, 17:40 -0700
Darn cool ! Be sure to check the analemma box then click and drag the month bar to see the Sun track through the analemma.
Sun position and shadow animation
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2013 May 16, 16:01 -0700
Here's a really neat little animation of the Sun's position in the sky and the shadow it casts during the day:
http://astro.unl.edu/naap/motion3/
Click on "Paths of the Sun Simulator". This is an Adobe Flash animation, so you won't be able to view it on many handheld devices, especially iPhones and iPads. If you do get it running, click "Start Animation" in the middle, and you can watch the Sun do its thing crossing the sky at any latitude and season. Also it shows the shadow cast by a "gnomon" (the observer's head in this case). You can watch the changing hyperbolic paths of the shadow during the year. The celestial sphere can be rotated around by clicking and dragging. It's a fun toy.
Thanks to Russell Sampson for pointing this out. He is a professor of physical sciences at Eastern Connecticut State University and was a recent participant in my "Celestial Navigation: 19th Century Methods" class at Mystic Seaport. He has a long-term project to determine the conditions under which Jupiter and other bright stars and planets can be seen in daylight which may also be of interest to some NavList folk. He and Jeremy and I spent an entertaining fifteen minutes in the late afternoon a couple of weeks ago trying to spot Jupiter with sextants. No luck!
-FER
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