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Frank

Having spent too long on this, I give you my ideas to shoot full of holes, so I can get on with what I had planned to do today.  Presumably, the idea was to identify sufficient stars to calculate the direction of the north/south Celestial Axis and thus latitude.  I was unable to identify any star with certainty, although I looked hard in Sagittarius.  Therefore, I tried a different method, which might be OK, or it might be rubbish.  The Milky Way appears to lie at about 50° to the horizon.  The Sun’s axis lies at 29.2° to the Galactic Plane and the Earth’s axis lies at 23.4° to the Sun’s.  Therefore, the Earth’s axis lies at 53.2° to the Galactic Plane and +/- 13.2° to the horizon.  There’s not much in the Northern Marshall Islands, so I’m guessing we’re somewhere around 13.2°S in the lower Solomon Islands or upper Vanuatu. We got palm trees, we got Christianity, we got a simple unframed  cross on the church like they use around there, we got a communications mast, but ain’t got a teapot. DaveP