Points of the compass 32-wind compass rose is yielded from the eight principal winds, eight half-winds and sixteen quarter-winds combined together, with each compass direction point at an ° angle from the next. In the mariner's exercise of boxing the compass, all thirty-two points of the compass are named in clockwise order. The traditional compass rose of eight winds (and its 16-wind and 32-wind derivatives) was invented by seafarers in the Mediterranean Sea during the Middle Ages (with no obvious connection to the twelve classical compass winds of the ancient Greeks and Romans). The traditional mariner's wind names were expressed in Italian, or more
Compass rose 30 degrees each; for more details, see the article on Classical compass winds). The "sidereal" compass rose demarcates the compass points by the position of stars in the night sky, rather than winds. Arab navigators in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, who depended on celestial navigation, were using a 32-point sidereal compass rose before the end of the 10th century. In the northern hemisphere, the steady Pole Star (Polaris) was used for the N-S axis; the less-steady Southern Cross had to do for the southern hemisphere, as the southern pole star, Sigma Octantis, is too dim to be