Hi all, a ton of great info here.

I'm curious for any of you skilled in celestial navigation. I just purchased a fun new toy, a solunar watch from Sky Time. It's a fun outdoor watch as it essentially has a 24 hour dial with a single hand which, by shading the disk and the outside ring, shows graphically sunset, sunrise, moonset, moonrise, and the phase of the moon.

One of the neat features also, though is that it will give altitude and azimuth of the sun at any given time during the day. The azimuth of the sun would give me a way to find true north on a sunny day, and I think makes a nice backup for my compass.

Sunrise and sunset information, as well as moon phase, rise and set obviously also would be useful in a survival situation.

Any ideas on what other uses having access to this type of info could provide? The watch allows you to set your location by city or by long/lat to make its calculations. One idea I had is that by, say, comparing the azimuth for a known location, to what I observe I might be able to figure out a rough location if I really didn't know where I was?

I bought this primarily because I find the sunrise/sunset and moonrise/phase/moonset useful, but I'm also finding it quite fun to play with.

For those who might be interested, there is more on the watch here:

http://www.skytimeonline.com/default.asp

(note: I'm not sure if it is OK to post links, mods, feel free to remove if this isn't kosher, believe me, I'm not shilling for the company, nothing to do with them at all)

Yes watches make a similar timepiece

http://www.yeswatch.com/

but I'm unsure if they give azimuth info.

Nice to meet you all.

T.B. Stevens