The joy of sextants
For many years I have wanted to learn how to use a sextant to find my position. It seemed romantic to take a noon sight and know where I was. At least that was the idea, but it wasn’t quite like that in practice.
The first thing I thought I should do was buy an inexpensive sextant, and a book: Bruce Bayer’s The Sextant Handbook, which I read from cover to cover. It was a good place to start, but that was the easy bit – the rest of it is not so straightforward.
A sextant is a very simple instrument with a telescope that looks straight ahead at the horizon. There is a moveable arm onto which a mirror is fixed that reflects the celestial body (let’s say the sun) so that it can be placed on another mirror alongside of which is a clear area where you put the horizon. The arm has a scale so that you can measure the angle the arm makes with
