NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Interesting ebay find: Plath suncompass - cira WWII
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2014 Sep 24, 22:04 -0700
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2014 Sep 24, 22:04 -0700
I was a tank commander on M60A1s and M60A3s and a senior armor instructor at Ft. Knox and we didn't have any sun compasses, I wish we had. All we had was the standard lensatic magnetic compass and I had to dismount and walk 75 meters away from that 106,000 pounds of compass deviating steel in order to get an accurate azimuth reading.
During WW2 there were a number of sun
compasses used by mechanized units. Even in Desert Storm in 1991 simple sun compasses were used.
See:
(page 10 shows the C. Plath sun compass)
Our own Geoffrey Kolbe used his own designed sun compass in the deserts of Egypt. Read his report about his celnav in the desert:
From looking at these various sun compasses it looks like you could easily make on by sticking a knitting needle upright in the center of your Rude star finder, HO 2102D.
Sun compasses are actually just sundials. If you set up a sundial properly with the gnomon pointing to true north and angled up equal to
your latitude, so that it is parallel with the earth's axis, the sundial will tell you the time. If you know the time then by rotating the sundial so that it indicates the time then the gnomon will be pointing at true north and the instrument can the be used to tell azimuths.
gl
