Multimedia Gallery
- Innovations: Sextant
This compact averaging sextant was widely used in the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II.
Celestial navigation involved taking readings with a sextant that were automatically fed into the Apollo Guidance Computer.
Astronauts used celestial sightings to update data stored in this computer, which calculated the spacecraft’s velocity and location.
To determine position in space, an Apollo astronaut located a specific star using a telescope and then took a fix using a sextant.
Weems used this sextant in training Charles Lindbergh and Lincoln Ellsworth.
Made by Jesse Ramsden in 1775, this machine permitted the automatic and highly accurate division of a circle into fractions of degrees of arc. The machine led to mass production of precision octants and sextants.
James Lovell looks through the telescope in the Apollo 8 command module.
Widely used by navigators in the Navy during World War II and the early Cold War.
This octant was used by the Lindberghs in the Tingmissartoq.
James Lovell was an Apollo astronaut who navigated to the Moon and back twice.