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A modern military compass, with included sight device for aligning. A compass is a device that shows the cardinal directions used for navigation and geographic orientation. It commonly consists of a magnetized needle or other element, such as a compass card or compass rose, which can pivot to align itself with magnetic north.
[24] [64] Al-Qibjāqī described a needle-and-bowl compass used for navigation on a voyage he took from Syria to Alexandria in 1242. [24] Since the author describes having witnessed the use of a compass on a ship trip some forty years earlier, some scholars are inclined to antedate its first appearance in the Arab world accordingly. [24]
Floating-card compass with prismatic sight (bearing 220° through eyepiece). The marine hand compass, or hand bearing compass|hand-bearing compass as it is termed in nautical use, has been used by small-boat or inshore sailors since at least the 1920s to keep a running course or to record precise bearings to landmarks on shore in order to determine position via the resection technique.
Direction determination refers to the ways in which a cardinal direction or compass point can be determined in navigation and wayfinding.The most direct method is using a compass (magnetic compass or gyrocompass), but indirect methods exist, based on the Sun path (unaided or by using a watch or sundial), the stars, and satellite navigation.
Nautical almanac used to determine the position in the sky of a celestial body after a sight has been taken. Parallel rules used for transferring a line to a parallel position. Also used to compare the orientation of a line to a magnetic or geographic orientation on a compass rose.
At first, compasses were thought to point towards locations in the heavens, then towards magnetic mountains. A modern experimental approach to understanding the Earth's field began with de Magnete, a book published by William Gilbert in 1600. His experiments with a magnetic model of the Earth convinced him that the Earth itself is a large magnet.
There are a number of different specialized magnetic compasses used by geologists to measure orientation of geological structures, as they map in the field, to analyze and document the geometry of bedding planes, joints, and/or metamorphic foliations and lineations. [1] [2] In this aspect the most common device used to date is the analogue compass.
A gyrocompass is a type of non-magnetic compass which is based on a fast-spinning disc and the rotation of the Earth (or another planetary body if used elsewhere in the universe) to find geographical direction automatically. A gyrocompass makes use of one of the seven fundamental ways to determine the heading of a vehicle. [1]