NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2020 Aug 17, 01:10 -0700
DavidC
I looked at Cdr Fanning’s 1979/80 article https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-navigation/article/div-classtitlethe-admiralty-compass-observatorydiv/A2858BB54D3A0E387B0EA4C04779E80E to see if it was worth going through the rigmarole of obtaining permission to publish an excerpt, but although interesting about compasses, it didn’t say much about sextants. All it said was that in 1947 they had spare capacity, so they took on the repair of marine sextants. This led onto work with submarine periscopic sextants. Then in 1967, when the National Physical Laboratory gave up its traditional role in testing marine sextants, the ACO became the only official marine sextant certification authority in the UK. Both activities brought in a modest return to the Crown. I've no idea what happened to the equipment or if anyone is still qualified to use it. DaveP
