A friend of mine gave me one, and it's sitting in my closet. I'd like to know how to operate it too. When I teach third semester calculus ad talk about spherical coordinates, I use longitude & latitude as a "real world" example (sorry about that). I'd like to have something (other than a GPS gizmo) that would let the students measure longitude & latitude. john On Sun, 17 Feb 2002 WaterskiPilot@aol.com wrote: > Hey everyone, > I have a possibly off topic question to ask. I have the possibility > of posessing my late Grandfather's sextant from when he was an ocean going > ship captain. Only thing, if I have it I want to know how to operate it. > Obviously, with LORAN and GPS, sextant knowledge is not very important any > more. Does anybody know where I could learn about using a sextant, doing sun > or star shots, etc??? I would love to learn this part of history, although I > know that I will never really use these skills as they once were used. Any > help would be great. > > TIA, > Jim > > Proud to be an American, > Jim Hann > Waterski J-41 Captain > STL > -- John F. Kurtzke, C.S.C. Department of Mathematics 278 Buckley Center University of Portland Portland, OR 97203 503-943-7377 kurtzke@up.edu