This milestone in aeronautical history marks the first use of the sextant in air navigation.

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Other important navigation tools include: the sextant, the astrolabe, the diptych, GPS devices.

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For measurement purposes, the transit of Venus is as obsolete as a sextant.

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When out of sight of land, they used a sextant and took bearings from celestial objects to determine their position.

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No global positioning systems, but sextant, sun and stars.

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Although Heyerdahl did take some modern equipment -- such as radios, charts and a sextant -- he argued these were all incidental to testing the theory that the craft itself could make the 4, 300 mile journey across some of the most challenging seas on Earth.

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In 1940, three years after her disappearance, the historic aircraft group's website states, a British official "found a partial skeleton of a castaway on a remote part of the island, " along with evidence of a "campfire, animal bones, a box that had once contained a sextant" and remnants of a man's and a woman's shoes.

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