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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2015 Oct 17, 14:54 -0700
FYI, there are plenty, well, at least several, sextants out there that use seconds on the vernier scales of their micrometer drums rather than tenths of minutes. One example is the Husun sextant in the attached photo (from Bill Morris's sextantbook.com site). Sure, the seconds will eventually get converted to minutes for use with the Almanac, but some sextants do not do this conversion "on the sextant dial". When I was writing the DOS predecessor to Celestial Tools, we had a couple of these sextants, so I included the ability to enter sextant altitude and index error as DM.m or DMS, which continued with Celestial Tools. Stan
Stan correctly points out that early Hughes Mates Three Circle sextants had a 10 seconds Vernier. Mine does too. I thought it worth checking if they used seconds on the certificate. They did in 1941. However, by 1963, the Vernier and certificate had changed to 0.2 minutes. See below. DaveP
