What are sextants?

A sextant is like a special ruler that helps sailors know how far they are from land, even when they can’t see it.

Imagine you're on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and you want to figure out where you are. You could look at the sun or the moon and use your sextant to measure the angle between them and the horizon. It’s like using a protractor to compare two lines, one from the object (like the sun) to the horizon, and the other from your eye to the object.

A sextant has a mirror that lets you line up two things at once: what you see in the sky and what you see on the water. By adjusting the angle until both lines match perfectly, you can calculate how far away you are from where you started, just like using a ruler to measure distance.

Sailors used sextants for hundreds of years because they were super accurate and didn’t need electricity or fancy tech. They could find their way home even when the sky was clear, and the stars were shining bright.