NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: The 57 Navigational Stars (and Zuben'ubi)
From: Ken Muldrew
Date: 2005 Apr 22, 09:14 -0600
From: Ken Muldrew
Date: 2005 Apr 22, 09:14 -0600
On 21 Apr 2005 at 21:42, Herbert Prinz wrote: > Indeed, surprising. I never understood the obsession of _modern_ > navigators with the special treatment of Polaris. We don't need to point > out to this forum the historical significance of Polaris. But nowadays it > is hardly more than a boy-scouts thing, just like finding north in the > woods with your watch: same importance and same accuracy. I once found myself walking down a deserted street in downtown Atlanta at 1:00AM progressively moving further into a particularly seedy part of town (this was before the olympics when Atlanta was the murder capitol of the US). The clouds briefly parted to reveal Polaris giving me the rather important information that I was walking the wrong way (and had been for the last 5 miles). I must say that on that occasion I found the importance of Polaris to rank very high. Ken Muldrew.