What? If the sun rises on your right and sets on your left that means you’re facing north. It doesn’t tell you anything about what hemisphere you’re in.
It doesn’t get cold at night in the deserty bits of the Middle East.
Well, having been a Scout, I can say many could give you a very rough guess. At least what hemisphere.
The climate of Saudi Arabia is marked by high temperatures during the day and low temperatures at night.
Look at the average low temperatures on that chart. Or go to the Rub’ al Khali at night and see how cold it gets.
Also remember that a “typical long haul airplane” requires a fairly significant runway. There really aren’t a lot of these around the world. In 1970’s during the multiple hijacking that eventually got the PLO booted out of Jordan, the hijackers had to blow up a 747 on the ground in Egypt because the desert landing strip that held the 707’s could not take the weight of a 747. There aren’t too many “jungle landing strips” that handle a 737 or A320, let along a 767-sized jet.
You might be able to estimate rough longitude from sunrise/sunset based on estimates of what the time lag is from your original departure point, but that might give a very rough guess without a timepiece.
To give an idea of accuracy, 90 degrees is 10,000km, so 1 degree (lat, or long at equator) is about 111km or 70 miles.
[QUOTE=iamthewalrus(:3=]
What? If the sun rises on your right and sets on your left that means you’re facing north. It doesn’t tell you anything about what hemisphere you’re in.
[/QUOTE]
Find a toilet and flush it. Observe the rotation.
http://www.saudiarabia-travel.org/weather.html
*Saudi Arabia is known for its desert weather and climate as a whole. It is characterized by an extreme amount of heat during daytime and a sudden temperature drop during the night with erratic, slight and occasional rainfall.
Weather conditions at night especially in the central desert region are famous for being chilly even during the summer as the vast amount of sand gives up its daytime heat very quickly the moment the sun set.
Over all Saudi Arabia provides extreme weather condition that may prove hard to adjust at first but once you settled down in this wonderful nation the ever changing cool and hot weather condition will prove to be easy to adapt to and seeing the rain fall at some time of the year is enough to give excitement to everyone.
Be sure to wear and light colored clothes during the hottest period of the year and have an extra jacket during the cold nights.*
Rub al-Khali represents one of the most extreme areas in the world with summer temperatures shifting from below 0ºC at night to over 60ºC at noon.
We looked closely at a landscape we might have simply journeyed through, and in just a few short weeks saw the many faces of the desert. Far from this empty nothingness we woke to dew covered sleeping bags and mist shrouded dunes as moisture rolled in from the coast and shivered as night-time temperatures plummeted to freezing point.
That’s all [nonsense](http://www.chinci.com/travel/pax/q/102788/Rub`+al+Khali/SA/Saudi+Arabia/0/#1|5|travel|pax|5|102788|Rub` Al Khali|SA|Saudi Arabia|Asia/Riyadh|00|DSRT|21.0000000|51.0000000|Saudi Arabia (general)).
So I give three cites and you come back with a site that agrees with me? *Temperatures drop sharply at night. *
The* average *nite temperature is *not how cold it gets at nite. * Deserts have a steeply dropping nite temp, with it being quite nice for a while, then getting freezing in the wee hours after midnite.
I spent many many nites in the American desert to wake up shivering and the water frozen over. Then to roast during the day.
Not a guarentee;, the water can flow either direction regardless of which hemishphere you’re in.
I think what was meant is that you can tell what hemisphere you are in by finding out whether the sun hangs out in the southern sky or the northern sky. You can tell east from west by observing sunrise and sunset. Presumably, when you are “looking” at the sun during the daytime, you are physically facing the half (north or south) of the sky that the sun is “in”. In the northern hemisphere, the sun usually is seen in the southern half of the sky and vice versa in the southern hemisphere. If the sun is more or less overhead at noon and/or switches between the northern and southern skies, you are probably in the tropics.
It’s a bit uncanny - spend most of your life at a relatively high latitude where the sun stays close to the horizon except around the summer solstice, and then travel to a tropical island where the sun is only a few degrees away from the zenith. Can be a bit freaky.
I’ve personally found angle measuring techniques using parts of your body, like those mentioned at this site, to be surprisingly useful. I’m not going to be able to tell you that I’m at 37 degrees latitude by using them, but I think I could get you within +/- 5. Or half a fist at arm’s length.
Really fun when you’re trying to figure out how far you are away from something when you know its height and some trig, or you know how far you are away from it, and you want to figure out how tall it is.
Probably not the US, then. Which is to say, how are the guards dressed? What’s their equipment like? What are you eating for food? Bottled water? What’s it say on the bottles, and what language is it printed in? Is there any incidental printing of any sort anywhere in the camp–safety labels on the sleeping bags, wattage printed on the light bulbs…
That’s a useful technique, but a degree of latitude is 60 nautical miles. Getting your latitude to within 5 degrees is placing yourself within about a 700 (statute) mile wide band circling the Earth. Close to the N/S portion of the 500x500 area the OP was asking about, but that’s still pretty big. If you gave me 37N +/- 5 degrees, the band would span about the height of California, for instance - extend the southern and northern CA borders around the globe to get an idea.
In what possible sense is “about 300” not “several hundred”?
For small values of 300 and large values of several hundred.
The ancients determined latitude by sun angle, not star angle. And they were pretty damned good at it. They got a very accurate diameter of the earth as well.
More modern navigation uses the sun angle with sextants. I can’t think of any serious navigation system that used stars in preference to Sun. The Viking navigators to Greenland and New Foundland used solar compasses in preference to tangling lode-stones.
Incidentally I’ve used a solar compass to good effect when I was orienteering and fell and smashed my magnetic compass. I stuck a grass-tree spike through the map and watched the shadow direction while compensating for time of day. It was nearly as accurate as a normal compass even on long legs.
Are there roads? Because I’m the bomb at Geoguessr, and it’s all about what language the roadsigns are in 
Actually, in all seriousness, I have a fairly good success rate at that game just from vegetation and “feel” of a lot of places. Some places that come up often (Texas-New Mexico, Parana Province in Brazil, Australia) just have a vibe to them.
So, you could just wait until one of the camera trucks drive by and hold up a sign that says “BEEN KIDNAPPED PLZ SEND HELP”