A Comprehensive Guide to Marine Sextant – Principles, Usage, and Maintenance
The sextant is a valuable instrument used to determine the angle between the horizon and a celestial body like the Sun, Moon or Star. It is used in celestial navigation to find out the latitude and longitude.
Sextant derives its name from the Latin word’ sextus; or ‘one-sixth’, as the sextant’s arc spans 60° or one-sixth of a circle. Octans with 45° arcs were initially used to determine the latitude. However, Sextants were developed with wider arcs to calculate longitude from lunar observations. They replaced octants by the latter half of the 18th century.
It consists of an arc of a
Content Original Link:
" target="_blank">
