Ads
related to: viking sunstone compass for sale
Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
In the History Channel's television series Vikings, a sun compass very similar in appearance to the Uunartoq disc was a significant plot device in the first season, as it allowed the Norsemen to maintain a consistent latitude while sailing west on the open ocean to raid Britain, though it was shown floating in water rather than hand-held as ...
Iceland spar, possibly the medieval sunstone used to locate the Sun in the sky when clouds obstruct it from view. The sunstone (Icelandic: sólarsteinn) is a type of mineral attested in several 13th–14th-century written sources in Iceland, one of which describes its use to locate the Sun in a completely overcast sky.
Viking Sundial. During an excavation of a Viking Age farm in southern Greenland part of a circular disk with carvings was recovered. The discovery of the so-called Viking Sundial suggested a hypothesis that it was used as a compass. Archaeologists found a piece of stone and a fragment of wooden disk both featuring straight and hyperbolic carvings.
The recovery of an Iceland spar sunstone from a ship of the Elizabethan era that sank in 1592 off Alderney suggests that this navigational technology may have persisted after the invention of the magnetic compass. [49] [50] William Nicol (1770–1851) invented the first polarizing prism, using Iceland spar to create his Nicol prism. [51]
AOL latest headlines, entertainment, sports, articles for business, health and world news.
Rune vs. sun compass vs. sunstone [ edit ] After checking out the reference links and doing some other Googling, I feel like this article is getting 3 or more completely different things mixed up: the magic rune-like symbol, the sun compass (of which only 2 artifacts exist), and the "sunstone" mentioned in literature.