NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2014 Feb 26, 12:25 -0800
Hi Brad, you wrote:
"The photo was meant to be good hearted fun."
And that's why I started my previous post with this sentence:
"Thanks for the photo, Brad. Here's a little fun with it..."
So thanks, again. It was fun. :) Your intentions were not mis-understood.
To elaborate a little more on my last point. I had written, "Turning back to sextants and their ability to read fine angles, that, after all, is ALSO exactly what happened to sextants in the early twentieth century! A micrometer is a "minute hand" geared to the main motion of the index arm. It took over a hundred years for that simple concept to be applied to the sextant itself."
It doesn't look like a minute hand on a clock, but that's literally what the micrometer is. The next time, you push the minute hand on a clock forward, and the hour hand rotates by some small but perceptible angle, you can compare it to rotating the micrometer on a sextant which in turn rotates the instrument's index arm. To me, it's intriguing that this geared micrometer concept was not applied to sextants decades earlier.
-FER
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