Abstract
Sailors are neither professional nor amateur astronomers, but people who have to observe the sky in the course of following their professional calling. As soon as sailors ventured far from the coast they required some guide and even in antiquity (as shown by mentions in Homer’s Odyssey and, considerably later, by Aratus) they used Ursa Minor and Ursa Major. With journeys farther afield, they gained some insight into latitude from the changes of the altitude of the circumpolar constellations above the horizon.
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© 1988 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Demerliac, A. (1988). Sailors and Astronomy. In: Dunlop, S., Gerbaldi, M. (eds) Stargazers. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-74020-6_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-74020-6_16
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