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Nature is full of clues to help you find your way – if you know where to look. Stuart Heritage lets go of the GPS to learn the art of natural navigation from pioneer Tristan Gooley
[...] How to navigate in a city
Look for satellite dishes. They all point towards the equator. In London, that is roughly south-southeast.
Find an 'invisible handrail' and use it to remember your bearings. In the countryside, this might be a river. In a city, it could be a main road.
Look at a tree. Do the branches point a certain way? That's probably south. Are the leaves on those branches smaller than the leaves on the opposite side? That's definitely south.
Use the sun. It rises in the east, sets in the west and moves through the southern sky, giving you a very basic compass.
Need to get home? Head against the flow of people at the start of the day or with the flow at the end and you are pretty much guaranteed to find a station.
Source: Ditching the satnav: the lost secrets of natural navigation
(Score: 3, Informative) by KritonK on Monday May 14 2018, @07:37AM (2 children)
Assuming you have a working analog watch: Place the watch horizontally. Take a small stick (e.g., a match or a twig) and place it upright at the end of the hours hand; rotate the watch so that the shadow of the stick passes through the center of the watch; the hours hand will point south. (In the southern hemisphere I assume it will point to the north.)
(Score: 1) by evilcam on Friday May 18 2018, @03:42AM (1 child)
That's not quite true..
You need to take the mid-way point between 12 and your hour hand.
Source: https://adventure.howstuffworks.com/survival/wilderness/true-north2.htm [howstuffworks.com]
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Friday May 18 2018, @08:25AM
Quite right. The way I described it, the hour hand will always point at the sun, not south! What I meant to write was that south will be at 12 o' clock, which is what we were taught during basic training in the army. As to which approach is more correct, the bisection method seems to be more correct: Assume that we are at sunset, during the equinox. The bisection method will point south, while the method, that we were taught, will point east!
There I thought that serving in the army had not been a complete waste of time, as I had learned to orient myself using the sun.