How to figure out property line over hills/woods

[dave1949]

There are several other options if you know the Bearings of the lines.

You can use a transit and take a noon sun shot to give you True South or you could adventure out at night and site on Polaris for North. Once you have one true direction and the bearing of line it's pretty straight forward to run a line using the transit.

Of course you could also take a star shot but they get to be a pain as they keep moving on you and there are several calculations involved.

This guy was way ahead of you Still too complicated for me
Dave.

Eratosthenes of Cyrene (b. c. 276 BC, Cyrene, Libya謀. c. 194, Alexandria, Egypt), Greek scientific writer, astronomer, and poet, the first man known to have calculated the Earth's circumference. At Syene (now Aswan), some 800 km (500 miles) southeast of Alexandria in Egypt, the Sun's rays fall vertically at noon at the summer solstice. Eratosthenes noted that at Alexandria, at the same date and time, sunlight fell at an angle of about 7 from the vertical. He correctly assumed the Sun's distance to be very great; its rays therefore are practically parallel when they reach the Earth. Given estimates of the distance between the two cities, he was able to calculate the circumference of the Earth. The exact length of the units (stadia) he used is doubtful, and the accuracy of his result is therefore uncertain; it may have varied by 0.5 to 17 percent from the value accepted by modern astronomers. He also measured the degree of obliquity of the ecliptic (in effect, the tilt of the Earth's axis) with great accuracy and compiled a star catalog. His mathematical work is known principally from the writings
of Pappus of Alexandria.

 

[Egon]

He was so far ahead of his time he was before the Flat Earth concept!

 

[Josephm]

There are several other options if you know the Bearings of the lines.

You can use a transit and take a noon sun shot to give you True South or you could adventure out at night and site on Polaris for North. Once you have one true direction and the bearing of line it's pretty straight forward to run a line using the transit.

Of course you could also take a star shot but they get to be a pain as they keep moving on you and there are several calculations involved.

Wow! OK - I couldn't resist. This is liable to lead to a headline in some local newspaper:

"Young guy burns out eyeballs in an attempt to shoot a transit at the sun" LOL

 

[dave1949]

He was so far ahead of his time he was before the Flat Earth concept!

Oh, that Dark Ages idea was just a bump in the space-time continuum.
Dave.

 

[dodge man]

Egon, unless you know the basis of bearing, I sun shot or north star shot doesn't do any good, unless that is the way the orignal survey was done. Most of the time I just assume that something is north on my surveys, such as a road or fence line. I have been surveying for 25 years and have never taken a sun or star shot. I have studied on how to do it for the surveyors test and it is not a job for an amatuer.

 

[Egon]

"Young guy burns out eyeballs

You gotta use a piece of paper to focus the instrument on. Tricky part is moving everything upside down.

With some of the Wild Equipment one had to be pretty careful when reading the degrees-minutes-seconds as they were internal whereas most of the transits had external verniers.

Sun shot gives you true South and the pole shot gives you true North. There were tables for getting to sidereal time from your local area time.

The bearings should all relate back to the true north, east, south, and west directions. [nx - wy ect.]

Actually a Sundial would be easiest to set up a north south line.

Polaris should be acceptable for the fence line accuracy without getting into all the proper calculations involving accurate time for the wobble..