“Bartolomeu Dias used the astrolabe to figure out the latitude of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, because they were so far south that they lost Polaris,” Huth says.

- [Narrator] An Astrolabe has many uses, from identifying stars, to finding daily time. It may have been developed by the Greeks but it reached its zenith in the hands of Islamic scientists.

Al-Khujandi’s astrolabe is essentially a clock, notes Prof. Hogendijk, with a 24-hour dial, using the sun instead of the modern hand. “The sun shows the time as the hand in the modern clock.

John B. McLemore restored antique clocks in Woodstock, Alabama — or Shit Town, as he liked to call it. Whether he realized it or not, McLemore, the curious hero of the hit podcast S-Town, was ...

An astrolabe is a scientific instrument used to work out the time of day using the sun or the stars. It could also be used for astrological horoscopes and mathematical calculations. Astrolabes ...