Re: Navigation by the stars and the Perseids

On Aug 12, 12:22 am, BlackBeard <spk_...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Sailors used to navigate by the stars. (end of Naval content)

Don't forget to stargaze tomorrow night for what should be one of
the better Perseid meteor showers in the last couple years. A new
moon will assist and if you aren't fortunate to live in the mojave
desert with little light pollution (Hey, you count your blessing
where you can find them dammit! ;) try and get out to the countryside
and away from the lights. Look NE from just above the horizon
(Perseus will be rising) to the zenith, the heaviest concentration,
about 90-100 per hour, will occur around 11pm pacific time.
My grandson and I are going to camp out on the deck with some
popcorn and the appropriate juice and make a night of it.
To steal a phrase "Virginia, it doesn't get any better than this"

ouch, that felt so ...dirty.

BB

I guess everybody has some mountain to climb.
It's just fate whether you live in Kansas or Tibet...

I recently had a long exchange on another newsgroup with someone who
believes that all sailors up to whenever, only sailed from one coastal
point to another in daylight. More recently, I have been informed that
the island of Crete was colonized from Anatolia about 7,000 years ago,
with cattle, sheep, pigs etc. Any boat or ship trip at that time would
have, out of necessity, been beyond daylight. The "boat" was probably
several logs tied together and paddled.

Most of us now live in cities where the stars are not evident, but a
half mile from the sea you can't miss them. In the neolithic
Mediterranean they would have been more obvious yet. Since there was
no TV the early inhabitants of the Mediterranean littoral watched the
stars, probably even seeing that they weren't constant, even over a
single evening, and made those changes part of their knowledge.

There is an argument that Stonehenge was built to predict meteor
showers, those being the hardest things in the sky to anticipate and
explain. A real heavy burst could create a religion.
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba45/ba45feat.html

http://research.amnh.org/~wyatt/Hayden/scl.html

.