A new way to navigate if you lose north star

How a pair of familiar constellations can help a person find a way through the world in the darkness when all other methods fail

- JOSHUA SOKOL

LONG BEFORE GPS and magnetic compasses, written maps or even writing, people oriented themselves under the cosmos using rules of thumb. Orally transmitted knowledge has repeatedly shown that indigenous peoples all over the world have sophisticated understandings of the stars.

And in early literature like Homer’s Odyssey, the nymph Calypso teaches Odysseus how to sail home by keeping the Great Bear constellation to his left. By now, it should seem like there is nothing new under the billions of suns that make up the night sky that could help people navigate in the dark. But a British author, Tristan Gooley, writes in a new book about following environmental signs throughout the year, “The Hidden Seasons,’ that he has identified a new pair of hacks to find one’s way through the world by starlight. The book is published by the independent publisher The Experiment and comes out on October 21.

Gooley, a proponent of what he calls natural navigation, preaches attention to common patterns in nature like a sommelier describing wine, the shadows cast by the sun here, the tree angled here, the moss greener on this side of the rock. As part of that work he has invented, or perhaps reinvented, a couple of wayfinding methods.

For example: After sunset in midwinter in the northern hemisphere, dress warm and go outdoors to a spot where you have a relatively unobstructed view to the south. Rolling up to the sky from the southeast, you will see a letter “V” made up of bright stars in the constellation Taurus.