The Electromechanical Star Tracker System in B-52 Bombers for Celestial Navigation

Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets, or the sun.

While celestial navigation is accurate, cannot be jammed, and doesn't require any broadcast infrastructure, it is a difficult and time-consuming process to perform manually.

In the early 1960s, an automated system was developed for the B-52 bomber to automatically track stars and compute navigation information.

Digital computers weren't suitable at the time, so the star tracking system performed trigonometric calculations with an electromechanical angle computer.