Celestial map-making

A dozen people standing in the middle Mount Street one day last week weren’t lost. They knew exactly where they were, courtesy of satellites circling the Earth and the Applied Geomatics Research Group (AGRG) in Middleton, part of the Nova Scotia Community College.

The crowd, with one eye open for traffic and the other on the locations being displayed by the small hand-held GPS receivers, were participants in an all-day training session organized by Admiral Digby Museum curator Sheryl Stanton.

Although the cold wind left participants shivering, the GPS receivers clearly showed the group’s location at the juncture of Mount Street and the abandoned DAR railway bed. All the streets of Digby were loaded into the receivers’ memory cards, and the most accurate fix came at the dead centre of the street.

AGRG is loaning four of the hand-held receivers to the museum until the end of September to help with a project to precisely map the location of as many area cemeteries as possible. The loans are part of a new program by the Middleton group that is designed to let local interest groups map features of their landscape and share that knowledge with the wider community.

The volunteers taking last week’s training came into the course with varying degrees of familiarity with the global positioning system, Stanton said afterwards. Some were fishermen who have used GPS on their boats, but she noted that there are differences.

“There are more obstacles on land to get in the way.”

The course was led by Heather Stewart, a research scientist with AGRG and coordinator of the Community Mapping Project in Annapolis and Digby counties, and by instructor Edward Symons of the geomatics department at the Centre of Geographical Studies in Lawrencetown.

The training session is required before groups can be loaned the hand-held receivers, but is offered at no charge. Any with a need or desire to learn about GPS technology to map local features is encouraged to apply online at agrg.cogs.ns.ca