There's a few highly suspect details in the way the author got the 34-35 degree estimate. Maybe he was just really lucky and the errors cancelled out, but don't count on using his method to produce similar results.
Polaris is about .8 degrees away from the celestial North pole, so using it alone can give a reading off by .8 degrees, and the orientation in the photo is actually nearing the worst case.
The horizon doesn't appear in the photo. I have done celestial navigation strictly as a hobby for fun, and using a sextant without a visible horizon results in a few degrees of error at best. And that's with the benefit of the sensation of gravity helping you estimate. It is theoretically possible to estimate the horizon using the man made parallel horizontal lines in the image, but the author doesn't give any indication he did that.
Additionally, the author used the angle measurement tool in Stellarium to measure the distance to another ambiguous horizon. This is incredibly odd, as just clicking on Polaris in Stellarium will tell you its elevation. But even more odd, is he would have had to explicitly set his latitude in the app in order to get that screenshot.
Polaris is about .8 degrees away from the celestial North pole, so using it alone can give a reading off by .8 degrees, and the orientation in the photo is actually nearing the worst case.
The horizon doesn't appear in the photo. I have done celestial navigation strictly as a hobby for fun, and using a sextant without a visible horizon results in a few degrees of error at best. And that's with the benefit of the sensation of gravity helping you estimate. It is theoretically possible to estimate the horizon using the man made parallel horizontal lines in the image, but the author doesn't give any indication he did that.
Additionally, the author used the angle measurement tool in Stellarium to measure the distance to another ambiguous horizon. This is incredibly odd, as just clicking on Polaris in Stellarium will tell you its elevation. But even more odd, is he would have had to explicitly set his latitude in the app in order to get that screenshot.