NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Old Sextant on German money
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2007 Jan 27, 11:40 -0800
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2007 Jan 27, 11:40 -0800
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. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to NavList@fer3.com To , send email to NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---