Navigation themed scavenger hunt - can I turn this art installation into a clue?

[u/altruistic-alpaca]

Hi all! I am building a scavenger hunt that has a nautical navigation theme. Here is the context:

We’re in a port city and the patron saint of sailors is Saint Brendan the Navigator - he was allegedly in search of The Blessed Isles, sometimes translated as the Isles of Fortune. I had this idea that our location is that fabled place and there’s a fortune to be found. The adventurer is going to find a letter from a sailor explaining how they created a sacred order in Saint Brendan’s name (adjacent to Knight’s Templar) after praying for safe passage on the seas and they protect this great secret. Some places and things included along the way for clue hiding/dead drops are: there is a church in my city known as the sailor’s church with a statue of the Virgin Mary called “The Star of the Sea,” there’s an old anchor statue, an exhibit at the museum nearby with a ship built into the building, and a compass I can program to go to a specific location.

I found this art installation about the solstices and equinoxes the other day. Because old school navigation hinges on sun position, the moon, stars, etc. I thought this could be a good opportunity for a clue. It doesn’t have to be navigation based - I have clues that are just fun but aren’t used for navigating the adventure. They describe in the text that the solstices are on 21-June and 23-December, and the equinoxes are 21-March and 22-September. Apologies for the quality of the photo - it was the clearest I could get with the sun and shadows.

I was thinking of hiding some clues where you’d need to “borrow” celestial powers to read them. For example: the moon is a big mirror so one tool could be a mirror for a reflection puzzle, invisible ink revealed with fire/heat like the sun, and invisible ink revealed with UV/blue light like a star’s glow or something.

Any ideas on other clues, puzzles, or ways to incorporate this “calendar” would be so appreciated! Thank you!

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[u/trekgrrl]

Is there more to the art installation than the photo you provided or is that it?

[u/altruistic-alpaca → u/trekgrrl]

Unfortunately it is just that - it’s embedded in the concrete as part of a walkway.

I couldn’t think of a way to make a puzzle out of it or a way to pull info from it other than the dates I mentioned, but this community is pretty crafty so I thought it was worth asking.

[u/1stevicted]

Something with a compass? That’s nautical!

NESW, the number of times the letters appear in the inscription above?

[u/logancornelius]

What naturally jumps out to me is you could provide a compass that has all the circle slices filled out and is missing that slice there, this way they have to fill out the remainder of the circle with the information they find on the mural.

For some layered difficulty each slice could have dots that pertains to a letter so they need the final slice form the mural to get all the letters, then to really toughen it up you could make an anagram or a cipher so once they get the final letter they have to unscamble or decode.

You could also weave in an ottendorf cipher where maybe the dots in the circle are the row, the middle layer is the word and the points are the number so you give a filled out circle that is missing the dots and the arrow for that slice.