2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York. Marine astrolabes were a simplification of the existing Islamic calculating devices and were used during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to measure the height of the sun at noon on sailing ships. With this value and the proper tables, sea captains could calculate the latitude and estimate the position of their ships during the long oceanic voyages that characterized the first age of globalization. This paper presents an inventory of all marine astrolabes known to exist, and proposes a taxonomy and chronology of their styles, based on the available data.
