NavList:

Josiah,

Good morning, I'm Bill McAllister (IBM :-), 

A former EC130GQ, TACAMO (tacamo.org) Naval Flight Officer with some operational experience celestially navigating about the planet.  This back when even the SSN's & SSBN's didn't even have acces to a global positioning system ('78 to '81) and the Naval Academy, Coast Guard, NROTC, Global Air Navigation and Merchant Marines all taught wanabe (& even those never-wanabe :-) navigatiors celestial navigation.

As you might imagine the birds I flew aboard were all fitted with a periscopic bubble sextant port that featured an azimuth ring that enabled the user to turn to the  precomputed Az in addition to selecting the Hc in the sextant prior to initiating the two minute sight to average out the vehicle dutch roll tendency.  So, you are correct that celestial navigation using a "handheld" bubble sextant in an unmodified FAA Certified general aviation aircraft is, while not impossible, problematic.  Regardless, please feel free to reach me at the email, voice or text below.

Further, as a member of the ASTM MOSAIC Light Sport Aircraft (mostly FAR Part 22, final ruling approved at AirVenture 2026), industry consensus / (self certifiaction) standards development team, I've been considering developing a celestial navigation functional content standard.  And, an experimental aircraft clearly offers the greatest flexability for vehicle modifications.

Finally, for the true-air-navigator-geeks among us I shall leave y'all with this awesomeness within the all but miraculous objective evidence as to why no other entity (in the more than fifty years since we first set foot upon the moon) even attempted to visit there before we elected to send folks back to the neighborhood:  SR-71's "R2-D2" Could Be The Key To Winning Future Fights In GPS Denied Environments

Regards, R  William McAllister, coldwarvet@gmail.com, 832-574-1562, MosaicAviationServices.com