Related papers: Navigating with the Kamal
For millenia, sailors have used the empirical rule that the elevation angle of Polaris, the North Star, as measured by sextant, quadrant or astrolabe, is approximately equal to latitude. Here, we show using elementary trigonometry that…
The use of the observed positions of celestial bodies to determine the location of a navigator and to direct vessels, was an aspiration of ancient seafarers. Various peoples, in the Mediterranean as much as in the Indian Ocean, in China as…
The students are introduced to navigation in general, and, in particular, the skills the medieval people of the Vikings used to navigate on the open sea. The topics of navigation and the Vikings are introduced by questions and a short…
Parallax is the most important astronomical method for determining the distances from the Earth to nearby stars. We present two hands-on activities that explore the concepts and practice of parallax measurement. The first activity is a…
The POLAR Investigation of the Sun (POLARIS) mission uses a combination of a gravity assist and solar sail propulsion to place a spacecraft in a 0.48 AU circular orbit around the Sun with an inclination of 75 degrees with respect to solar…
I describe how to obtain a rather good experimental determination of the eccentricity of the Earth orbit, as well as the obliquity of the Earth rotation axis, by measuring, over the course of a year, the elevation of the Sun as a function…
COMPASS is an on-axis 2.6 meter telescope coupled to a correlation polarimeter. The entire instrument was built specifically for CMB polarization studies. Careful attention was given to receiver and optics design, stability of the pointing…
The parallel globe is an old, very simple and ingenious device that, when systematically employed in astronomy classes, becomes a teaching tool with great potential. Properly oriented according to the local meridian, this instrument allows…
This lesson unit has been developed within the framework the EU Space Awareness project. It provides an insight into the history and navigational methods of the Bronze Age Mediterranean peoples. The students explore the link between…
Among the first devices used to measure the time we find the sundials and the water-clocks, as told by Vitruvius in his book on the Architecture. The sundials work because of the shadows cast by a rod or pole, the gnomon, on their…
Longitude determination at sea gained increasing commercial importance in the late Middle Ages, spawned by a commensurate increase in long-distance merchant shipping activity. Prior to the successful development of an accurate marine…
We will discuss about a possible method of using the cubit rod by the architects and the surveyors of Ancient Egypt to measure and draw lengths, comparing it with the other interpretations present in Literature. Instead of the modern…
This paper investigates the determination of the Qibla direction using both astronomical and geometrical approaches. The study reviews historical and classical methods employed by Muslim scholars and astronomers including the use of…
Sophisticated computation methods were developed 4000 years ago in Mesopotamia in the context of scribal schools. The basics of the computation can be detected in clay tablets written by young students educated in these scribal schools. At…
Inertial navigation and attitude initialization in polar areas become a hot topic in recent years in the navigation community, as the widely-used navigation mechanization of the local level frame encounters the inherent singularity when the…
This paper presents a novel end-to-end Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) navigation approach for long-range visual navigation in the real world. Inspired by dual-process visual navigation system of human's instinct: environment understanding and…
We introduce the south-pointing chariot, an intriguing mechanical device from ancient China. We use its ability to keep track of a global direction as it travels on an arbitrary path as a tool to explore the geometry of curved surfaces.…
In the Tuscan Archipelago (Italy) it's possible to make an approximate measurement of the Earth's radius from the Elba Island using the Pianosa Island as a ship that appears and disappears on the horizon depending on the observer's height…
Our landscape has been shaped by man throughout the millennia. It still contains many clues to how it was used in the past giving us insights into ancient cultures and their everyday life. Our summer school uses archaeology and astronomy as…
Pulsars are natural cosmic clocks. On long timescales they rival the precision of terrestrial atomic clocks. Using a technique called pulsar timing, the exact measurement of pulse arrival times allows a number of applications, ranging from…