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I visited Germany about 10 years ago, and again a few years later. Of all
the souvenirs I took back with me, guess which one I still have safely
squirreled away?

Robert
----- Original Message -----
From: "alex" 
To: "NavList" 
Sent: Saturday, January 27, 2007 2:40 PM
Subject: [NavList 2132] Old Sextant on German money


>
> Dear list members,
> Many of you probably know that there is a picture of a sextant
> on the famous German 10 DM bill dedicated to Gauss.
> (Unfortunately, this money bill was removed from circulation with
> the introduction of Euro. I saved a few of them, unfortunaly very
> few, and until recently, some of these bills were traded on the
> Internet, see, for example,
> www.math.purdue.edu/~eremenko
> and click on the "Portrait of Gauss".
> There you can see the picture I am refering to in the rest of this
> message.
> (The face of the 10DM bill has a portrait of Gauss, together with the
> graph of the Gauss Law (a.k.a. Normal Distribution, a.k.a. Bell
> curve),
> a very nice picture, and the correct formula).
> The back of the bill has a very detailed picture of a sextant
> (much better than most e-bay pictures:-)
> and also a map of the triangulation Gottingen-Altona (Hamburg) that
> Gauss
> made.
>
> I am mostly concerned with the sextant.
> It is a double frame (=coumn frame) vernier sextant/pentant
> probably of the late XVIII century. Notice: it does not have horizon
> filters.
> It has some strange horizon mirror adjusting device (Dollond?)
> and something underneath the horizon mirror which I don't understand
> what it is.
>
> But the most curious feature of this sextant is the Index glass.
> It looks like consisting of two pieces, the kind of an index glass
> I've never seen before.
> Can anyone answer what is this?
>
> (There is no doubt that the artist who made this engraving had some
> museum piece
> in front of him, and tried to reproduce it as precisely as s/he
> could).
>
> Alex.
>
>
> >
>



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