For hundreds of years, travelers have looked to the sky to help navigate their way across oceans, deserts, and land. Whether using the angle of the Sun above the horizon or the night stars, celestial bodies guided explorers to their destinations. In...

Until the advent of modern navigational tools in the sixteenth century, mariners had since ancient times used similar methods of navigating, largely by instinct. Even as late as the earliest voyages to the New World by Spanish and Portuguese...

Celestial navigation, also known as astronavigation, is a position fixing technique that was devised to help sailors cross the featureless oceans without having to rely on dead reckoning to enable them to strike land. Celestial navigation uses angular...

THROUGHOUT the history of the world, many of man's most spectacular accomplishments have been the work of navigators. No matter whom you credit with the discovery of America--Columbus, Vespucci, Leif Ericsson, or even some anonymous Irishman--the fact is that the skill of the...

Byline: Kurt Rosenkrantz The seas had gradually calmed, and a brisk breeze pushed the H.M.S. Centurion swiftly north. But Commodore George Anson felt no joy at his progress, only grim despair. For the previous two months, the Centurion had been battered by...

As a not-so-newly divorced woman with an eight-and-a-half-year-old daughter, I have lately developed a habit of grilling married couples with the same intensity and awed fascination that I imagine Charles Darwin felt for his Galapagoan critters: What magical beasts are these, and how did they...