NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2024 Nov 28, 06:18 -0800
Frank Reed you wrote: ‘Hey, it's Thursday! Ha ha ha. Take your time... But I do look forward to reading the "True and Surprising Historie of the Astrovan so-called".’
OK Frank. You asked for it. I’ll try and make it no longer than your "True and Surprising Historie of the Endurance Documentary”. In fact, having finished preparing ‘Sir William Robetson’ with a couple of hours to spare before my talk, I relaxed by seeing what I could find in my PC and came up with the attached. Isn’t ‘Search Docs’ wonderful? It's hard to believe I started thinking about this almost 10 years ago. I think I might have started writing it with a view to publication in Navigation News, but I can’t remember if the “To-it” was ever “Got-round-to”.
To summarise. After what I’d written, we took it to a couple more show-days at Newark Air Museum where it was well received, but it was always a worry loading, driving there, setting up, and the reverse, so when Covid came along, it was convenient to take a rest, and of course, we never got started again. I put together an A4 two-sided-sheet, which folded in two to make an A5 certificate, calculation form, and Mercator chartlet of the local area. A pleasing number of adults and children tried either just looking though a peri-sextant at the Sun (well shaded) or plotted their Sun line as well, but probably not more than 20 in total. The interesting thing was that children seemed to get on far better than adults. I think it must have been because the children came with no preconceived ideas and simply did exactly as they were told. I thought about taking it to school ‘experience-days’, but the group sizes would have been too large, so we concentrated on modelling the Solar System round a giant orange beach ball on the school sports field instead (noisiest child designated as Neptune). DaveP
