A sextant can be used to obtain the relative horizontal angle between two landmarks, but it is much easier to use an azimuth ring. A sextant is designed to be used vertically. Holding and using one horizontally is difficult and time-consuming in comparison and is probably a less than a 1% use case, used only during the training of apprentices as a theoretical exercise (source: professional mariner for many years and daily user of a sextant back in the day). A comparison would be using a screwdriver to drive in a nail; you could do it given enough time, but a hammer is much easier.
I believe the explanation is much simpler: the glyph simply represents a variety of angles measured from north (the common meaning of azimuth) avoiding the use of any lettering (like “N”) or the use of a compass-like symbol which would be difficult to represent at such small scale.
Also (pedant warning for another poster) Polaris is not the brightest star, it’s around the 40th and has no practical use for navigation other than “north is roughly that way”.
The way I see it, it appears to be an arrow curling around the vertical axis, representing the turn from the angle's start to the angle's end. In that sense, the modern curvy arrow actually makes more sense than the original jagged one (which maybe was easier to typeset - or maybe just disproves my theory).
You can see one here: https://sextantbook.com/2019/01/13/a-french-hydrographic-sex...
The linked article is by W.J. Morris, and his book on sextants is in my opinion one of the standard works and much recommended.
"Haussystem Didot" in the article's referenced typesetting catalog refers to the typesetting of the Didot family's printing agency. And they used that symbol 1700 and onwards in their map navigation descriptions in these books:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de...
I am gonna repeat myself, but search for the Gallica links in each of those books to find the scans. There you can see earlier usage and evidence that as I pointed out in other - downvoted comments - that this was commonly used for sextant navigation instructions.
I did not find any evidence for earlier examples in any of the very few scans I looked at, nor does a search through the Google Books scans give any indication for words that seem related to the concept.
This would be such a fantastic find! Could you point out a specific example?
-- Paraphrased from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
Every once in a while you run into something like this and realize the standard is not just for text encoding but also a kind of archive of specialized notation from different fields.
It makes you wonder how many other symbols are sitting in the table that are still mostly unknown outside the niche communities that originally needed them.
Unicode's entire point being to make "normal software" handle those symbols ;)
For years Ł support on Python on windows for example broke sometimes when imported from poor quality Excel files haha
Maybe this is the opportunity to invent and suggest a symbol for Altitude?
Consider the Moon as viewed from NYC at time of comment [0], it is hiding below the horizon. If you were to look at my website and then at the sky you might become upset that I am reporting the shape of the moon, but obviously it can't be seen. Hence why the website reports the angle below the horizon roughly half the time it isn't visible.
Adding Azimuth and Elevation when the Moon is above the horizon would be for completionism only and not the real enterprise use-cases served by ANSI compliant renderings of the Moon.
[0] https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon/?lat=40.7...
> From that apparent beginning, the Angzarr was swept up into the Monotype typeset catalog of arrow characters (...) It is unknown why Monotype added the character, or what purpose it was intended to serve
> In 1988, the International Organization for Standardization added the symbol to its Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) definition, apparently pulling it from the Monotype character set.
> In March 2000, the Angzarr symbol reached wide distribution when the Unicode Technical Committee, in collaboration with the STIX project, proposed adding it to ISO/IEC 10646, the ISO standard with which the Unicode Standard is synchronised. The Angzarr was proposed in the ISO working-group document Proposal for Encoding Additional Mathematical Symbols, although no specific purpose is listed for the symbol.
My guess is that the people proposing the addition of new maths symbols[1] weren't going to decide on inclusion or exclusion of a symbol on the basis of being familiar with it themselves or not, since that was likely true for many symbols that happened to only be used in fields of mathematics that they were not working in. Meaning they had to rely on some other kind of "authority" to infer that a symbol was used by the larger maths community. With that in mind "being part of the Monotype catalog and part of SGML" seems like a pretty sensible heuristic to go by.
Another consideration might have been that they simply wished to have complete coverage of the symbols that SGML encoded, regardless of familiarity with the symbols involved. And of course both could have been true.
Ah, of course :)
A lot of old German sailor maps (e.g. from the Hamburg or Bremen maritime museum exhibitions) contain Azimutal angle descriptions. The globe on an azimutal map is projected from the North Star in the center.
This way you could more easily calculate the angles you would need to use the Sextant (which was focused on the brightest star, the North star). They also used circles (the tool) to calculate relative speeds, current drift etc with it.
I thought this was kind of common knowledge, as a lot of museums have that sorta thing for children in their exhibitions to try out.
The article quotes the Didot system, specifically, which focused on printing travel maps and is known not only in the French speaking world for its timely accuracy [1] as it was also using that very same map system.
Maybe read the article next time?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didot_family
[2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de...
