How to Use sextant in a Sentence

sextant

noun

• Yet here was a guy in harm’s way trying to find his way in a war zone with something about as easy to use as a sextant.
  — Scott Canon, kansascity.com, 15 May 2017
• Note that with my DIY sextant (and most others), the string would point to a value on the protractor that is not the angle above the horizon.
  — Rhett Allain, WIRED, 3 May 2018
• Sure, a protractor works, but a sextant does this even better.
  — Rhett Allain, WIRED, 3 May 2018
• Long before the advent of GPS and too far north for his compass to be of much use, Maultsby used only a sextant and the stars to navigate, like a sailor from a bygone era.
  — Alex Hollings, Popular Mechanics, 4 Sep. 2019
• Instead, long-distance sailing was done by relying on the position of stars and use of sextants.
  — Danielle Rossingh, CNN, 13 Mar. 2018
• Back in 1940, partial human remains were found on Gardner near the remnants of a campfire, along with an empty sextant box and pieces of a woman's shoe.
  — Paula McLain, Town & Country, 17 Jan. 2017
• The city is having a bit of fun with the sextant versus quadrant debate, by offering up a Twitter poll and selling T-shirts with the competing designations.
  — oregonlive, 1 May 2020
• How precious are the signs of what these people actually did, whether open books or sextants or carpenter’s tools; the piano that graces a grave in the City of London, Hogarth’s tomb in Chiswick with his palette and brushes.
  — 1843, 21 May 2020
• The sextant was, however, designed to superimpose a pair of star images, could not be used to photograph objects, and, with a field of view only 1.8° wide, would require a highly skilled operator to spot an LM at all.
  — David S. F. Portree, WIRED, 29 May 2012
• The sextant sailors used in the 18th century for celestial navigation had a telescopic attachment (which gave Popeye the Sailor his characteristic squint).
  — Austin Grossman, The Atlantic, 13 Oct. 2019
• Other devices, like modern clocks, sextants for precise navigation, and much later modern computers, took their place.
  — Laura Poppick, Smithsonian, 31 Jan. 2017
• There are also lots of smaller instruments—thermometers, sextants, astrolabes—and plenty of globes, as well as an enormous armillary sphere, designed and built by the Italian astronomer Antonio Santucci.
  — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 17 May 2020
• Thus, Portland is considering creating a sixth sextant.
  — Andrew Theen, OregonLive.com, 28 Feb. 2018

Last Updated: 24 Jul 2024