The same techniques guided ancient Polynesians in the open Pacific and led Sir Ernest Shackleton to remote Antarctica, then oriented astronauts when the Apollo 12 was disabled by lightning, the techniques of celestial navigation.
www.militarytimes.com
"Maritime nostalgia, however, isn't behind the return.
Rather, it's the escalating threat of cyber attacks that has led the Navy to dust off its tools to measure the angles of stars.
After all, you can't hack a sextant."
Incidentally, the Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point requires proficiency with sextant.
When I was on research ship in 70ies, ships' officers and captain used sextant.
We in the science lab used the TRANSIT satellite system. It was cumbersome. Had to listen to satellite receiver for whistle of stallite coming over the horizon, then manually tune the local oscillator to zero beat, then lock.
The processor for the data I built, before embarking on the ship, at Lamont Observatory Electronics lab, many many transistor flip flops etc. on about 25 8x8 inch plug in boards. Was the first civilian data capture system. The receiver and antenna was given to us by the Navy.
Then the data was passed to the Freiden machine to generate punched tape of usually 15 to 20 feet long.
Then manually tell by toggling input switches of the PDP8 computer (a full 8 foot rack) with 2 kilobytes of memory, that a program tape was to load.
After the program was loaded, then another set of manual toggles telling PDP8 that data was coming via punch tape. After many minutes of blinking lights, PDP8 would print out on the Teletype machine the location of where we were when the data was receieved.
Given our max cruising speed of 6 knots, it was close enough, even for government work.
Then, over the intercom we would call the bridge with the location, for them to campare. And note on the charts.