NavList:

David Pike, you wrote:
" I suppose there’s a moral here for Google researchers. "

The moral applies equally well to traditional sources of information: you may be looking at a stock photo!

So how can you tell? On the modern Internet, there are a number of tricks you can use. If you browse the web using Google Chrome, you can right-click (or option-click on a Mac) on the image and select "Search Google for image". Those clever little algorithms will then dig through the entire vast database of images that the google-bots have visited and find matches in various sizes and formats as well as near-matches and even "similar" images (similarity from the point of view of a piece of software, which can often lead to fascinating and weird results). If you try this procedure on the image from the article at titanicnewschannel.com posted in 2012, you will discover that the photo used there is apparently one that is widely used on the Internet. In fact, as is so often the case, it appears to originate in a Wikipedia article. I didn't try this procedure on the article from the new auction. Maybe that represents the actual RMS Carpathia sextant or maybe it's yet another stock sextant image.

By the way, if you don't use Google Chrome for your browser, you can still use the Google image search service by dragging and dropping into the normal image search on Google's web page, or you may be able to find a plugin or add-on --here's one for Firefox.

Frank Reed