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Astrolabe   Listen
noun
Astrolabe  n.  
1.
(Astron.) An instrument for observing or showing the positions of the stars. It is now disused. Note: Among the ancients, it was essentially the armillary sphere. A graduated circle with sights, for taking altitudes at sea, was called an astrolabe in the 18th century. It is now superseded by the quadrant and sextant.
2.
A stereographic projection of the sphere on the plane of a great circle, as the equator, or a meridian; a planisphere.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Astrolabe" Quotes from Famous Books



... says he gloomily, and so brought me into a smallish cabin under the top-gallant poop; here were bunks to larboard and starboard with a table mid-way furnished with calendars, charts, a cross-staff, an astrolabe, with globes and the like, while against the walls stood rows of calivers, musquetoons and fusees, set in racks very orderly. "Aye, shipmate," says he, noting my gaze, "every firelock aboard is either here or in the arm-chests i' the ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... unavailable as a book for family reading, but which we must chiefly impute to the customs of the age, Chaucer was, in the main, a religious man, and his poems are, in the main, religious poems. Chaucer was certainly a good father, and attended as far as he could to the education of his boys. His "Astrolabe," a work on astronomy, was written for his little Lewis, who was probably his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... of him," said Malicorne, "only I must study faces and circumstances a little better before I act; those are my magical inventions and contrivances; and while sorcerers are enabled by means of their astrolabe to take the altitude of the sun, moon, and stars, I am satisfied merely by looking into people's faces, in order to see if their eyes are encircled with dark lines, and if the mouth describes ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... vntill the worke was finished. The fift of September, the height of the Sunne being taken, we found our selues to be in the latitude of [72] degrees and a halfe. [Sidenote: How the latitudes were alwayes taken in this voyage rather with the Staffe then Astrolabe.] In this voyage commonly wee tooke the latitude of the place by the height of the sunne, because the long day taketh away the light not onely of the Polar, but also of all other fixed Starres. And here the North Starre is so much eleuated aboue the Horizon, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt



Words linked to "Astrolabe" :   sextant



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