Celestial Navigation

[Longhorn]

This was in part inspired by the water compass thread, but it's been something that I have been wanting to learn since grade school and never really did. The closest I've come to it was taking an Astronomy course in college for a semester.

I'm curious if anyone on here does this or has done this, and what are your thoughts on it?


Taken from wiki...

Celestial navigation, also known as astronavigation, is a position fixing technique that has evolved over several thousand years to help sailors cross oceans without having to rely on estimated calculations, or dead reckoning, to know their position. Celestial navigation uses "sights," or angular measurements taken between a celestial body (the sun, the moon, a planet or a star) and the visible horizon. The sun is most commonly used, but navigators can also use the moon, a planet or one of 57 navigational stars whose coordinates are tabulated in the Nautical Almanac and Air Almanacs.

Today it's probably pointless unless you're on the open water where you can actually see all the stars, but if everything gets thrown back to the stone age, I'm sure this would be quite useful.

Thoughts?