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In 2013, researchers from Eötvös University in Hungary argued that the Uunartoq disc could have also been used to determine a traveller's latitude. [13] The researchers pointed to a series of very short inscribed lines stacked atop one another on the disc's north index mark, whereas gnomonic lines by necessity run from west to east across the sun compass's face.
A Hungarian team proposed that a sun compass artifact with crystals might also have allowed Vikings to guide their boats at night. A type of crystal they called sunstone can use scattered sunlight from below the horizon as a guide. What they suggest is that Iceland spar crystals were used in combination with Haidinger's brush.
A bearing compass is a magnetic compass mounted in such a way that it allows the taking of bearings of objects by aligning them with the lubber line of the bearing compass. [79] A surveyor's compass is a specialized compass made to accurately measure heading of landmarks and measure horizontal angles to help with map making .
Viking ships were marine vessels of unique structure, used in Scandinavia throughout the Middle Ages. The boat-types were quite varied, depending on what the ship was intended for, [ 1 ] but they were generally characterized as being slender and flexible boats, with symmetrical ends with true keel .
Vegvísir is a compound word formed from the two Icelandic words, vegur and vísir. Vegur means 'way, road, path' (lit. ' way '), and vísir, inflection form of vísa, 'to show, to let know, to guide' (lit.
It has been speculated that the sunstone (Old Norse: sólarsteinn, a different mineral from the gem-quality sunstone) mentioned in medieval Icelandic texts, such as Rauðúlfs þáttr, was Iceland spar, and that Vikings used its light-polarizing property to tell the direction of the sun on cloudy days for navigational purposes.
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It has also been called "water-sapphire" and "Vikings' Compass" because of its usefulness in determining the direction of the sun on overcast days, the Vikings having used it for this purpose. [8] This works by determining the direction of polarization of the sky overhead. Light scattered by air molecules is polarized, and the direction of the ...