Cassens & Plath Horizon Ultra Sextant
The Cassens & Plath Horizon Ultra sextant is available in either a white or traditional black finish. Apart from personal preference in looks, the white finish is considered to be more resistant to tropical heat insofar as expansion and contraction are concerned. However, our feeling is that this problem is minimal due to the engineering design of the frame which is not unduly affected by thermal changes. The double prism lens is a beveled clear lens which is mounted as a sun shade and shows a discontinuity in the horizon if the sextant is not perpendicular to it. This lens can be readily introduced into the field of view, or stowed out of the way at the viewer’s option. This very nice feature, however, can only be used with a whole horizon mirror. A traditional split mirror would block half of the field of view and obscure the discontinuity, rendering it ineffective For this reason, the Horizon Ultra is normally recommended only with a whole horizon mirror, although a traditional split mirror may be installed in the existing frame later if desired. One sunshade in both the index and horizon array is polarized allowing for variable density if desired.
A distinctive feature of this model is a drum index corrector. This is a separate smaller knob that extends forward from the micrometer drum. Turning it allows the index error to be quickly corrected to zero by resetting the micrometer drum indication.