NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Ronald M Hansen
Date: 2022 Jul 9, 03:15 -0700
The navigator on the Argo, Jorge de Castilho, in his book about the flight said the left handed Coutinho sextant allows the navigator to write down observations without putting the sextant down. Also, the left handed configuration has a scale the reads left to right, as text does.
Decades ago, I made a few sun sights with Professor Francis Rogers using Coutinho sextant 11,390- a left handed model. He has an excellent description of the Coutinho sextant and Coutinho's method of sight reduction in his book Precision Astrolabe (Lisbon, Academia Internacional Da Cultura Portuguese, 1971). That sextant is now in the collection of the Old Dartmouth Historical Society's Whaling Museum in New Bedford, MA.
As a left handed person, I never realized how convenient the standard right handed configuration is for noting down observations until I read your post.
Ron Hansen
