Let's Talk Trash 2018-2019 school yr

Let’s Talk Trash! MAY / JUNE 2019

b y t h e S t a r s

Before the Age of Discovery, ships rarely sailed far from the coast. A navigator could establish his location by looking at the shore. If he recognized a mountain or beach, he knew where he was. Finding your way by using such landmarks is called piloting. Pilots away from the coast had another way to figure out where they were. They could "take a fix" (find their position) with dead reckoning. In this method, the navigator simply kept track of the ship’s direction and speed since the last fix. Then he made corrections for winds and ocean currents. (These may have forced the ship off course.) From this information, he could take a new fix. Early navigators also guessed their position by following the STARS . This is called celestial navigation. The navigators could determine their latitude, or north-south position, by seeing how high in the sky a particular star was. The easiest star to navigate by was the North Star (Polaris). It is always just above the North Pole. It can be seen from anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Using the North Star, a navigator can keep a steady course east or west. All he has to do is make sure that the North Star stays at the same place above the horizon. In the Southern Hemisphere, a constellation called the Southern Cross is used the same way.

Mermaids are just characters in stories, of course. But in a world saturated with mermaid mythology, people sometimes think they see them in real life. When Christopher Columbus set out to sea in 1492, he had a mermaid sighting of his own; little did he know that this encounter was the first written record of Manatees in North America . It might seem strange to confuse a slow-moving, blubbery sea cow with a beautiful, sh-tailed maiden. It is a common enough mistake that the scientic name for manatees and dugongs is Sirenia, a name reminiscent of mythical mermaids. Even today there are false mermaid sightings. After a fake documentary special on mermaids aired on Animal Planet in 2013, calls ooded the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from people asking for the truth about mermaids. The fact is that mermaids are entirely ctional. https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/marine-mammals/mermaids-manatees-myth-and-reality

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