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Dear list members,
Many of you probably know that there is a picture of a sextant
on the famous German 10 DM bill dedicated to Gauss.
(Unfortunately, this money bill was removed from circulation with
the introduction of Euro. I saved a few of them, unfortunaly very
few, and until recently, some of these bills were traded on the
Internet, see, for example,
www.math.purdue.edu/~eremenko
and click on the "Portrait of Gauss".
There you can see the picture I am refering to in the rest of this
message.
(The face of the 10DM bill has a portrait of Gauss, together with the
graph of the Gauss Law (a.k.a. Normal Distribution, a.k.a. Bell
curve),
a very nice picture, and the correct formula).
The back of the bill has a very detailed picture of a sextant
(much better than most e-bay pictures:-)
and also a map of the triangulation Gottingen-Altona (Hamburg) that
Gauss
made.

I am mostly concerned with the sextant.
It is a double frame (=coumn frame) vernier sextant/pentant
probably of the late XVIII century. Notice: it does not have horizon
filters.
It has some strange horizon mirror adjusting device (Dollond?)
and something underneath the horizon mirror which I don't understand
what it is.

But the most curious feature of this sextant is the Index glass.
It looks like consisting of two pieces, the kind of an index glass
I've never seen before.
Can anyone answer what is this?

(There is no doubt that the artist who made this engraving had some
museum piece
in front of him, and tried to reproduce it as precisely as s/he
could).

Alex.


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