Sudden geeky desire of the day

[luzula]

So, I'm reading a lot of Patrick O'Brian and polar exploration and stuff right now, and they're always using sextants to determine where they are. I got a sudden desire to try it. I asked my housemate the military officer, but they apparently don't have any old sextants lying around at his regiment. Probably because they're army, not navy (although they do have an old apparatus for measuring distance by triangulation).

Uh, has anyone on my flist used a sextant? I am this close to buying one on the Swedish equivalent of eBay.

Comments

[isis]

I have! When I lived on a sailboat, we had a "GPS" - that's "gray plastic sextant" - as an emergency backup. It was given to us by a friend, who had acquired it God knows where. A very cheap instrument, we both played with it and practiced with it and never managed to get our location correct within a couple hundred miles.

[luzula]

I figured that if anyone was going to reply to this post, it would be you. *g*

I've always been fascinated with astronomy and celestial mechanics, and also there's mathematics involved, of course. Hmm, we'll see if I end up getting one. Or if I can borrow one somewhere.

Google tells me that a Swedish round-the-world sailor has invented a new type of sextant which is supposed to be small, cheap and reliable. Hee, look at his weather-beaten beard.

[isis]

It's a very cute little sextant - I think. (All I see is beard!) But mostly sextants are for fun. GPS is very cheap these days.

[luzula]

Yeah, I've used a GPS plenty of times, though usually it was to take coordinates for rare species. When I've sailed with my family, we've never needed one, because Sweden's west coast is a big archipelago, and you can navigate by the islands.