Celestial navigation Celestial navigation Celestial navigation, also known as astronavigation, is the ancient and modern practice of position fixing that enables a navigator to transition through a space without having to rely on estimated calculations, or dead reckoning, to know their position. Celestial navigation uses "sights", or angular measurements taken between a celestial body (e.g. the Sun, the Moon, a planet, or a star) and the visible horizon. The Sun is most commonly used, but navigators can also use the Moon, a planet, Polaris, or one of 57 other navigational stars whose coordinates are tabulated in the nautical almanac and air almanacs.
Dynamics of the celestial spheres of the planet, which transforms its overall motion from circular to oval, to a moving soul in the planet since the motion is "not a natural motion, but more of an animate one". In various writings, Kepler often attributed a kind of intelligence to the inborn motive faculties associated with the stars. In the aftermath of Copernicanism the planets came to be seen as bodies moving freely through a very subtle aethereal medium. Although many scholastics continued to maintain that intelligences were the celestial movers, they now associated the intelligences with the planets themselves, rather than with the celestial spheres.