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STARSStories

21 December 1968

A sextant between the worlds

Three men leave Earth for the Moon. In the cabin, one of them takes a star sight, as if a sea were still under the hull.

Earth to Moon and back

SPACECRAFT IMAGENASA. Earthrise, photographed from Apollo 8 on 24 December 1968. The sextant work happened in the cabin. It is not in this frame.

Apollo 8 leaves on 21 December 1968. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, William Anders. First people to go to the Moon and around it.

In the command module there is a scanning telescope and a 28-power sextant, part of the guidance and navigation system. Lovell takes star and horizon sightings. The machine thinks it knows where it is. The star is how he checks.

ASTRONOMY

A space sextant still needs catalogued stars. The method is the marine one moved off the sea: two lines of sight, an angle, a clock. This is not Polynesian wayfinding and not Voyager’s star tracker. The recurrence is the need: a distant light as a reference for a traveler.

ANALOGY

A navigator at sea and an astronaut in a cabin are not the same office. Both ask a distant light: where am I pointed?

Question

When the destination is another world, why does the path still need a star?

Sources

Also this sky