God forbid you are lost in the desert and you have no idea which of the cardinal directions you are facing.

Or you want to track a satellite and need to find north, south, east or west direction.

You have no phone with compass,

You have no actual compass.


The sun is blazing angrily on your head.

You can actually use that to your advantage.

That is, you can use the sun to identify which direction is which.


This is the sun/ shadow method of finding the cardinal coordinates.

Look for an opening that is unobstructed to the sun where you can see your shadow.

Get a stick and place it upright. The longer the stick the better.


Mark off the edge of the shadow of the stick.

Leave it in the sun for about 30 minutes.

By the time you get back the shadow would have moved and it will seem longer.

If you feel the deviation is long enough, mark off the end of the new shadow.

Join the two marked edges (of the two shadows) together with a line.



This is the west-east line.

The concept of this method bothers on the fact that the sun moves to the west to set, thereby casting a shadow from west to east.


So, the shadow moves from west to east.

Therefore, you can extrapolate the west-east line and then draw a perpendicular line on it to get north-south line.


So that's, it ..... Your cardinal coordinates without compass.



Please kindly leave comments if you find this beneficial.

The question should be... do we even have desert in Nigeria
Good analysis @ op

Goahead:
The question should be... do we even have desert in Nigeria
Good analysis @ op

Lol.

But there are other scenarios where this can be applied.

Goahead:
The question should be... do we even have desert in Nigeria
Good analysis @ op

One needs no desert to carry out this.
The OP's thread is of great importance in Survey, town planning layout et al. If a recce survey is carried out on site, and there's no equipment handy, this works. By the way, I also use this method on site layout if I don't want to use any equipment. Its a quick method but it doesn't tell the actual bearing, degree and minutes of deviation. Thumbs up OP.

Thanks a bunch op

lomomike:

One needs no desert to carry out this.
The OP's thread is of great importance in Survey, town planning layout et al. If a recce survey is carried out on site, and there's no equipment handy, this works. By the way, I also use this method on site layout if I don't want to use any equipment. Its a quick method but it doesn't tell the actual bearing, degree and minutes of deviation. Thumbs up OP.

Op was talking about lost in the desert not town planning and Co bro
Anyway thanks for the observation

Nice...good work with the pictures!
You never can tell when it will be useful.

Goahead:
Op was talking about lost in the desert not town planning and Co bro
Anyway thanks for the observation

lol.


I only used that as a humorous scenario.