ASTROLABE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Astrolabe

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noun

Astrolabe n.

(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 It is now superseded by the quadrant and sextant.

A stereographic projection of the sphere on the plane of a great circle, as the equator, or a meridian; a planisphere.

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Etymology of 'Astrolabe'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Astrolabe" Quotes from Famous Books

... surveyed the lovely island of Wai-hiki, and thus terminated the survey of the Astrolabe Channel and Hauraki Bay. He then resumed his voyage in a northerly direction towards the Bay of Islands, sailing as far as Cape Maria Van Diemen, the most northerly point of New Zealand, where, say the Waidonas, ...

— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne

... few, crouching in their frail sail boat that had survived many a tempest; since the mutineers of the Bounty had cast them adrift in the mid-Pacific. In the early years of the nineteenth century the scientifically directed Astrolabe arrived, under the command of Dumont D'Urville, and, later, Captain Owen Stanley in the Rattlesnake, with Huxley as his zoologist, Then, in 1858, came Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of Darwinism, who, by the way, is said to have been the ...

— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

Words linked to "Astrolabe" : sextant