NavList:

I see that I had a QSO with Nyle, K7NS, last February, 12 meters CW.  

I don't see either amateur radio or celestial navigation as obsolete.  I do agree that celestial navigation is almost never needed for its original purpose.  I also agree that ham radio as an emergency communication tool is superseded in 99.9% of circumstances by different tools.  

The way I look at both of them is a little different.  How can they be used to introduce people, in particular young people, to the science that underlies much of what they encounter on a day to day basis?  95% plus of persons reading this post will be using a radio receiving and transmitting device that operates in the 13cm band.  That is how many of our wireless devices in the home communicate.  A portion of that band is allocated to amateurs, but it is a niche area.  People don't think of amateurs experimenting at the high end of UHF, or bouncing signals off the moon, or an aurora.  That's because we amateurs don't do enough to leverage that end of the hobby.  Yet that is the part of it which can still attract the young to STEM.  Not grey-hairs playing with morse code of holding VHF radios at a running event.

Understanding satellites ties into GPS, which ties into what we do with celestial.  If GPS is the ability of a receiver and a software tool to "know" the precise positions in space of a number of objects, and use that "knowledge" to determine a position on the surface of the earth - so too is celestial navigation.  The difference is that GPS the objects are man-made and use radio (gross simplifcation - but you get the idea).  I like to use celestial nav as an analogue tool to introduce young people to the concepts of electronic navigation, which they use on a daily basis.

I like the backstaff idea.  Even a fun exercise like building a sundial for a specific latitude can introduce people to things they don't think about.  Another fun exercise I did a few years ago using a vertical stick and a shadow to see how close we could get to an accurate measurement of latitude at the nearest local noon to the equinox.