NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Introduction
From: Michael Daly
Date: 2007 Oct 31, 14:58 -0400
From: Michael Daly
Date: 2007 Oct 31, 14:58 -0400
Someone asked me to let readers of the list know who I am and a bit about my background. I live in Canada, in a town a short distance from Toronto. I have had an interest in scientific instruments for a long time and started taking it more seriously about 21 years ago. I have quite a few books on the topic, as well as having read material in libraries - mostly periodicals on the history of science. My main interests are in navigation, surveying and astronomy. I would like to be able to collect antique instruments, mostly in navigation and surveying, but the price of these instruments is getting out of reach. I have one old octant, an ivory and ebony Spencer, Browning & Co. from around 1840 that I acquired at an auction about 15 years ago. The other instruments I have, a Heath sextant, a surveyor's theodolite and level are relatively modern and I actually use them occasionally if only to show people how they work. (The theodolite I've used while checking out rural properties to buy a few years ago - never found one that wasn't either swamp or $$$$$$$). I learned basic sextant use in university as part of a land surveying course in civil engineering. It was a nasty thing for them to do, as it only reinforced a bug that bit when I was a kid and dreamt of sailing around the world - that after an aunt gave me a gift of "Men, Ships and the Sea" and a world map (both National Geographic publications) around 1961. I learned the stars with quite a few years of amateur astronomy, but eye problems (mostly reduced averted vision) makes my deep-sky interests harder to do. My real experience in sailing (transferred later to canoeing and sea kayaking) has been in piloting, not navigation. I've never been far enough offshore in a sailboat to require navigation. Most has been on large lakes here in Canada, but I've also done a three-week trip from Norfolk, Virginia to Montreal, Quebec thirty years ago. I was taking a sailboat back to Montreal for someone who wintered in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, no sextant use there, just chart and compass and occasional RDF. I bought a GPS a decade ago but it sits in a drawer as I prefer to use chart and compass while sea kayaking (sailboats are too expensive as I can't bring myself to sail anything smaller than a 30' keelboat). Part of my fun is in transferring skills and equipment learned on a sailboat's chart table to the small deck of a kayak - parallel rules replaced by homemade grids and string etc. I've often thought that a pocket sextant would be a "useful" addition :-) Reading this list has sparked my interest in lunars. If the clouds ever clear, I'll grab my sextant and head outside to fiddle with the method - and check out that comet while I'm at it. Mike --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to NavList@fer3.com To , send email to NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---