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ASTROLABE, THE ORIGINAL SMARTPHONE WITH GPS
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Imagine a device that can give you the time, your location, your horoscope, and even help you make decisions—all with the swipe of a hand. It’s overpriced, customizable and comes with a variety of bells and whistles. No, this isn’t the latest iPhone. It’s the Astrolabe, a remarkably versatile tool that was used for centuries first in the Islamic world then in Europe, before being quietly overshadowed by newer technologies.

Astrolabes were used for Celestial Navigation since around the 15th century. The instrument is used to find altitude, and find latitude. The mariner’s astrolabe measures the height of the sun or a star above the horizon. Used with star and planetary charts and tables, the observer can find their latitude and calculate their position on the ground.

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The Story of the Astrolabe

The history of the astrolabe begins more than two thousand years ago in the Roman Empire, but it is in the Islamic classical world that the astrolabe was highly developed and its uses widely multiplied. Introduced to Europe from Islamic Spain in the early 12th century, it was one of the major astronomical instruments until the modern times.

How are they made

These multi-use tools consist of a circular stack of sliding features all embedded within a disk called a “mater”. A round plate containing a two-dimensional projection of the Earth’s latitudinal lines sits within the mater and, over that plate, another circular feature called the “rete” contains the locations of certain well-known stars in the sky. Over that, a straight rule pivots around to line up with time measurements along the edge of the mater. And on the back of the whole thing, a pivotable siting device helps find the altitude of a star—often the starting point of a calculation.

Astrolabe Functions

An Astrolabe has over 300 functions and one needs a course to understand and use all these functions. Some of the main functions are listed below.

telling the time by the sun or stars
finding the time of sunrise or sunset
measure the time of the year
qibla or direction of Mecca and predicting prayer times
height of a building
determine the current latitude
determine GP(Ground Position) by latitude and altitude
position of the sun, the moon, the planets and stars

This multifunctional device was conceptual ancestor to our smartphones of today.