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In a paper presented at the 1999 U.S. Nautical Almanac Office
Sesquicentennial Symposium, George Kaplan wrote: "If celestial
navigation is to assume a broader role in the modern Navy's high-tech
environment, its limitations will have to be addressed: low accuracy (a
few miles), limited time window for observations (horizon must be
visible), and low data rate. The sparse amount of celestial data
collected over the course of a day results from the use of a human (with
other duties) as a detector and computer, the small number of target
objects (usually just the Sun and bright stars), and restrictions on the
sky area used (altitudes 15° to 65° ). It turns out that all of these
limitations are a consequence of the way in which celestial navigation
is now carried out, rather than being fundamental to the technique. They
are a result of the human-intensive observing and computing procedure we
use, and in that sense are self-imposed. However, if we are willing to
think a bit more broadly about how celestial navigation could be
performed, we find that these problems have technical solutions."

http://gkaplan.us/content/NewTech.html

Several other Kaplan papers on celestial navigation are available in PDF
at the USNO site:

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/publications/docs/reports.php

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