3 ms·
celestial navigation is 4000 years old
by vdfs 3y ago
celestial navigation is 4000 years old
- jojobas 3y agoAutomatic, no-human-in-the-loop, is a bit different dontchathink?
- hutzlibu 3y agoI think it is waaaay older. The north star and the southern cross probably guided humans since they had some sort of consciousness. If you see the night sky every night (without distracting screens), the shapes became kind of familiar.
- robocat 3y agoNitpick: The North Star (Polaris) wasn't used over 4000 years ago: So now you can see why Polaris will not always be aligned with the north spin axis of the Earth - because that axis is slowly changing the direction in which it points (precession)! Right now, the Earth's rotation axis happens to be pointing almost exactly at Polaris. But in the year 3000 B.C., the North Star was a star called Thuban (also known as Alpha Draconis), and in about 13,000 years from now the precession of the rotation axis will mean that the bright star Vega will be the North Star.
- hutzlibu 3y agoWell, good point, but every moment in history had its fixed south and north stars, you could find easily, if you were familiar with the sky. Which everyone was back then. As well as some animals, who also use the stars for navigation.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoThere’s no good reason to assume that in the absence of an extremely bright star that happens to be north-aligned that a culture navigated the stars with a north-anchored reference ;)
- hutzlibu 3y agoThe reason would be, that you can see that the sky is rotating around a certain point in the north, or south depending where you are. All the stars are changing - but this point is not. So even when there is no bright star at that spot - there will be star constellations around pointing towards it. A fixed point or area of reference ( and with no artificial lights, there definitely would be some star to see). But of course if you really know the dark sky well, there are a lot more points of references, you will remember what constellations will be where at what time of the night at what season. Or where the moon is, etc.
- h4ch1 3y agoand how many people do you know that can effectively navigate using it?
- imwillofficial 3y agoHow is that relevant?