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More examples of sextants in pop culture (and some slide rules, too --last paragraph). I've been saving these up for a few months.

The various Star Trek series that have been running for the past few years decorate their sets with sextants of a sort. Since all of these are set centuries in the future, I guess we can't fault them for confusing decorative toy sextants with the real thing, or for positioning them in weird inverted positions, or pointing the scope 90° away from proper orientation. But since it's a 21st century prop department, I think I will fault them!

The first image in this set shows Captain Christopher Pike of the USS Enterprise in "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" with a sextant on his desk. It's inverted. Does that make it look more interesting? And in another episode, we see two officers discussing sex, and there's that sex-tant sitting inverted on the desk again (one of those officers is an early version of the Vulcan "Mister Spock"... but his ears are wrong! ...which is actually related to the conversation that they're having).

Next up is a frame from an episode of "Star Trek: Lower Decks" which is a devlishly clever, frequently comical animated (but still canonical!) trek series and, sure enough, the virtual prop master has carefully drawn in a sextant. And of course, it's inverted. This is common on "Lower Decks". Nearly every scene has some callback or a bit of fan-service, reflecting on over fifty years of the Star Trek franchise...

Finally, I'm including an image from "The Orville" which is Seth MacFarlane's unlicensed "stolen" Star Trek (very similar to a licensed Star Trek series, and if MacFarlane were not so powerful in Hollywood, this would have been annihilated by lawsuit fazers and flotron torpedoes). On the shelves behind the desk in this one, there's a small sextant on the far left. It's one of those cheap decorative toys you can find on ebay. Its scope is pointing the wrong way, which often happens because they're cheap imitations. It also looks like there's yet another one of these decorative sextants on a lower shelf. See it? I'm not quite sure it's a sextant or a sextant-alike. If so, then this Trek-alike has two sextant-alikes!

And now, for something completely different... two slide rules from pop culture media products. Can anyone identify the brand and/or model/type of slide rules seen in these images? The first one is definitely "pop culture" but the hand holding it is a real and famous person --an erstwhile Nazi working on a Moon rocket (and no, not Elon Musk!). The other example is more obscure. It's from a recent episode of the AppleTV production "For All Mankind" in which an American character trapped in the Soviet Union c.2003 (not a typo; this is 'alt history') is working for the Russian space program. Is there anything worth knowing about either of these slide rules?

Frank Reed

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