Instrument	:	Geodetic sextant
Manufacturer	:	Observator
Country of origin	:	The Netherlands
Manufacturing year	:	January/Februari 1979

I've obtained this geodetic sextant in 2000. An exceptional instrument as it has a centesimal scale (this means the scale is devided in the 400gon system, where 400gon equals a full circle). The drum micrometer is divided in centigrads (one hundreths of a gon) and can be estimated another decimal although that will be beyond the instrument's accuracy.

It also is exceptional in the fact that is has six legs to rest on, three of them on the telescope side. One of the legs is actually blocking a part of the view through the telescope. The other geodetic sextant by Cassens & Plath in my collection has the legs mounted in a better way, so out of the telescope's path. This type of sextant was first built in Sweden where it was used for geodetic network measurements on land along the coast. Later on it was also used by the KNMI (royal Dutch meteorological institute).

The handle has a threated hole, to make it possible to attached the instrument to a tripod or to attach a perpendicular handle. When using this perpendicular handle the instrument can't be laid down as usual on its back, so three additional legs are provided on the front to rest the instrument on.