Word: sextant
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...Despite all the progress in long-range radio aids to aerial navigation, a good navigator likes best to find where in the world he is by celestial star sights, a process that involves only himself, his sextant and the heavenly bodies. Last week New York's Kollsman Instrument Corp. gave the ancient science of celestial navigation a modern twist, announced a new sextant that, once preset, will seek out the proper star or planet, average a series of sights, and flash its readings by remote control to the navigator. With a three-star fix, he can pinpoint the position...
...Arctic. At the instructor's command, each student climbs the spiral stair that leads to the platform inside the dome. He glances up at the simulated stars and selects the ones he thinks will guide him best. He observes their position with a sextant, just as he would on a real airplane, and hurries back to his desk to figure out his position over the Canadian tundra or the frozen Polar...
...made the most of ancient astronomical findings, the U.S. Navy began studying radio astronomy to see whether a celestial radio signal might be something to steer by. Recently, the Naval Research Laboratory, working with the Collins Radio Co. of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, revealed some details of a radio sextant that can navigate ships by radio waves from space...
...radio sextant, according to Radio-Astronomer Fred Haddock of NRL, is a dish-shaped antenna only three feet in diameter. When the receiver is switched on, it readily picks up the radio waves that come from the sun, and automatically turns to a point in the sun's direction. Then it "locks on," tracking the sun as long as it is above the horizon. The ship's navigator can find his position just as if he had an assistant watching the sun through an ordinary optical sextant. No cloudy weather gets in the way of the radio sextant...
...fitted out a 23-ft. Bermuda-rigged sloop, Felicity Ann, with a 5-h.p. diesel engine, a radio receiving set, pressure kerosene stove, sextant, compass and chronometer. In May she set sail from Plymouth Harbor. Plagued by storms, she was forced to land in Brittany, Spain, Gibraltar, Casablanca. From Casablanca, she headed for the Canary Islands, was overdue 18 days and given up for lost before she finally made Las Palmas in the Canaries. Last week, 65 days later-and eight months after she started-Ann dropped anchor at Portsmouth, Dominica...