NavList:

David P, you wrote:
"To be honest, the little white pinpricks of stars were so faint I could hardly make them out, even on my twin 24” PC monitors."

This leads me to suspect that you may have been looking at the "preview" image, which is intentionally "low res".

Preview image: https://navlist.net/imgx/nav-stars-in-Atlantic-article-june2025-2.jpg.thumb.jpg.
Original image: https://navlist.net/imgx/nav-stars-in-Atlantic-article-june2025-2.jpg.

Can you see Leo in the original image? When I first saw the image, it jumped right out at me ...look at that scary lion! The constellation Leo is one of the most distinctive patterns in the sky, especially if you know the "Sickle" within it ...the scary lion has a scary blade! Of the zodiac constellations, only a couple resemble the animal they're supposed to represent: Leo and Scorpius (though Capricornus does look an awful lot like a "sea goat" if you squint at just right, and Cancer does resemble a large crustacean... at midnight, hiding under a rock). The head of Hydra, to the right of Leo in the original image, is also quite distinctive and worth learning but that's a whole 'nother level of constellation identification.

The three navigation stars in view in the original image are Denebola, Regulus, and Alphard (Hydra). I think they're the only ones.

I mentioned a star called Zavijava. If you look it up, you'll find that it's a fairly faint "third magnitude" star in Virgo, and yet bright enough to be known also as beta Virginis. Zavijava paired with Denebola makes an excellent "north pointer" like the "Orion North Arrow" in the winter sky. Since it is close to the celestial equator, Zavijava is visible almost everywhere on the Earth, and Denebola is visible everywhere except Antarctica. Also because it's near the celestial equator, the tilt of the line between the pair (in a three-dimensional sense) makes an angle relative to the local horizontal plane that is equal to the observer's latitude, very roughly.

Frank Reed