The Celestial Tracker as an Astro Compass

This paper describes a navigational system which accurately determines aircraft true heading and an altitude intercept from which position is determined. This is accomplished by automatically and continuously tracking the light from a celestial body with a stabilized telescope utilizing a photomultiplier tube as the sensor. The line-of-sight to the body is accurately measured with respect to the local vertical and used to correct computed pointing commands. The computed information is determined from aircraft position, celestial data, and time.