NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2023 Jan 6, 12:03 -0800
I spotted this random photo (from a friend of a friend) today on Facebook, and I am borrowing it without credit mostly because I can't figure out where I found it originally! It's a beach shot looking east-southeast from Pagham, Bognor Regis on the southern coast of England. The photo captures long rows of giant wind turbines, miles away, in the Rampion offshore wind farm. This has relevance to navigation because there are various angular piloting problems that can be puzzled out here (*), and also because we have a textbook case of "masts" of fixed height dropping away in apparent height beyond the horizon. Does it make sense? That is, do the apparent angular heights beyond the horizon match our expectations from navigational formulae? I made a map based on one at the wind farm's website that may help. I haven't worked this out in detail. But it seems like an interesting puzzle, and, like I say, a textbook case of beyond the horizon angles.
Frank Reed
* There's a nice navigation trick here. If you look out there with your binoculars and see all the turbines in one of the farm's rows all stacked up on top of each other visually (like the left-hand group in the photo), then you've got a line of position running right along that row. Of course you have to make sure you count correctly and know just which row you're aligned with!
