Which direction am I facing?

The basics

The eight compass directions

Every direction is an angle measured clockwise from north. North is 0°, and a full turn brings you back to 360°, which is the same bearing. Four of these angles are the cardinal directions — north, east, south and west — and the four sitting between them are the intercardinal, or ordinal, directions. Together they form the compass rose, and they are enough for almost every everyday use.

Need finer resolution? The full 16-point compass table on the main compass page splits each of these again, into points such as north-northeast and west-southwest.

No device needed

How to find directions without a compass

A phone needs charge and a magnetometer, and neither is guaranteed. These methods need neither, and they are worth knowing because they also let you sanity-check a reading you do not trust.

The shadow-stick method

This is the most accurate thing you can do with no equipment, and it works anywhere the sun is visible.

1. 1

   Push a straight stick upright into level ground. Any stick about a metre long works, on open ground that is not in shade. Mark the very tip of its shadow with a stone.

2. 2

   Wait fifteen minutes and mark the tip again. The shadow moves as the sun does. Place a second stone at the new position of the shadow tip.

3. 3

   Draw a line between the two marks. That line runs roughly west to east. The first mark you made is the western end, because shadows travel eastward through the day.

4. 4

   Stand with the first mark on your left. With west on your left and east on your right, you are now facing north in the northern hemisphere, and south in the southern.

Using the sun

The sun rises in the east and sets in the west — but only roughly. Only at the equinoxes does it rise due east; the rest of the year it drifts north or south of that by an amount that grows with your latitude. As a rule of thumb it is good to within about twenty degrees, which is fine for getting your bearings in a town and not fine for crossing open country. At solar noon the sun sits due south if you are north of the tropics, and due north if you are south of them.

Using the stars

In the northern hemisphere, Polaris — the North Star — sits within one degree of true north and barely moves all night, which makes it the most accurate natural direction reference there is. Find it by following the two outer stars of the Plough, or Big Dipper, upward by about five times their separation. In the southern hemisphere there is no equivalent star, so you extend the long axis of the Southern Cross about four and a half times its length to find the south celestial pole, then drop straight down to the horizon for south.

Precision

Directions in degrees, and why they beat names

“Head southwest” and “head on a bearing of 225°” sound like the same instruction, but they are not equally useful. Southwest covers everything from 213.75° to 236.25° — a span of more than twenty degrees. Walk a kilometre along the wrong edge of that span and you end up nearly four hundred metres from where you meant to be. Over ten kilometres it is close to four kilometres out.

This is why every serious use of direction — aviation, marine navigation, surveying, antenna alignment — is specified in degrees, and why the readout on this page leads with the number and treats the cardinal name as the convenience, not the measurement. It is also why the difference between a magnetic direction and a true one is worth caring about: in parts of Alaska, eastern Canada or New Zealand, that correction alone is larger than the entire width of “southwest”.

To turn any of these names into a precise bearing with declination applied, the online compass on the main page reads your sensor live and shows the magnetic and true heading side by side.

In practice

When you need to know your directions

Questions

Directions, answered