Official 14 Set 5 Seafarers and Stars 古航海家对星象的利用-听写

Listen to part of a lecture in an astronomy class

ok 

last time we talked about ancient agricultural civilizations

that observed the stars and then used those observations to keep track of the seasons 

But today I want to talk about the importance of stars for early seafarers

about how the fix pattern of the stars

were used as navigational aids

you all heard about the vikings and their impressive navigation skills

but the seafaring peoples of the pacific islands

the polynesians and micronesians

were quite possibly the world's greatest navigators

long before the development of advanced navigational tools in Europe

pacific islanders were travelling from new zealand to hawaii and back again 

using nothing but the stars as the navigational instruments

the key to the pacific islanders' success

was probably their location

near the equator

what that meant was that the sky could be partitioned, divided up 

much more symmetrically than it could farther away from the equator

unlike the vikings

early observes of the stars in polynesia

or really anywhere along the equator would feel that they were at the very center of the things

with the sky to the north

and the skies to the south

behaving identically

they could see stars going straight up in the east

and straight down in the west

so it was earier to discern the order in the sky

than farther north or farther south

where anything would seem more chaotic

take the case of gilbert island

they are part of polynesisa

and lie very closely to the equator

and the people there 

were able to divide the sky 

into symmetrical boxes

according to the main directions 

north east south and west

and they could precisely 

descript the location of the star

by indicating its position 

in one of those imaginary boxes

and they realized

that they had to know the stars

in order to navigate

in fact there was only one word

for both  in gilbert island

when you wanted a star expert

you asked for a navigator

islanders from all over the pacific

learned to use

the stars for vavigation

and they pass this knowledge down from generation to generation

some of they utilized stone structures called stone canoes

these canoes were on land 

and you can still see them on some islands today

they were positioned as they were heading in the direction of the points 

on the sea horizon

where certain stars twould appear and disappear

during the night

and young would be navigators 

set by the stones at night 

and turned into different directions

to memorize the constellations they saw

so they could recognize they and navigate by them later on 

when they went out the sea

one important way 

the polynesians had

for orienting themselves

was by using zenith stars

A zenith star was a really bright star

that would pass directly over head

at a particular latitude 

at a particular distance

from the equator

often at a latitude associate with some pacific islands

so the polynesians could estimate their latitude just by looking straight up

by observating whether a certain zenith star

passed directly over head at night

they'd know if they have reached the same latitude

as a particular island they were trying to get to

another techique by the polynesians was to 

look for a star pair

that's two stars 

appeared at the same time

or set at the same time

and navigators could use these pairs of stars as reference points

because they rise or set together  only at specific latitudes

so navigators might see one pair setting together

and would know how far north or south of the equator they were

and if they kept on going 

and the next night they saw the pairs of stars setting separately 

then they would know that they were at a different degree of latitude

so looking at rising and setting of star pairs is a good technique

actually it makes more sense with setting stars

they can be watched 

instead of trying to guess when they will rise

all this shows that navigating doesn't really require fancy navigational instruments

the people of pacific islands had such expert knowledge

of astronomy

as well as navigation

that they were able to navigate over vast stretches of open ocean

it's even possible that polynesian navigators had already sailed to the Americas 

centuries before columbus