NavList:

I wrote:
"This is not rocket science."

And Dave W., you wrote:
"Actually it is. Star trackers are widely used in space and available off the shelf from multiple vendors."

Ha! You got me there. While we're at it, the problem of navigation in space is much easier since you have all of the stars to work with. It's then just a pattern-matching problem. I looked at one of those star trackers on the Ball Aerospace site that you pointed out, and it says it has the star database right inside the tracker itself. The star tracker is a "black box": it apparently does the computational work right on the device and outputs orientation directly. This is a relatively easy task these days.

A while back I took some photos of some astro photos. I had old prints from the late 1970s which were themselves printed from slides. The slides were 30 to 90 second exposures of various star fields in the summer Milky Way. The prints were curled up and fairly weathered. I photographed them, by hand with no special orientation, using the basic digital camera on my phone and then uploaded those images to a flickr page that feeds these images to the astrometry.net servers. They do the pattern matching. Every single photo came back correctly identified, each with a dozen or more stars and deep sky objects marked, including two star fields which I could not recognize in the original photos (turned out I had photographed the dense star fields around the constellation Lacerta back then). It's pretty amazing.

-FER

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