When you are sailing at night you take bearings of lights you see with a hand-bearing compass. This is a device you look through and it tells you the magnetic bearing of the object you have lined up in the cross hairs. If you see a light that you can't identify then you take bearings on it over the course of a few minutes, and you remind yourself of the sailing motto, "If the bearing does not change, a collision will occur".
I was on a night sail in the Mediterranean with one of my younger cousins who came down below in a panic to report we were on a collision course as the bearing of the light she had spotted was not changing.
I think she could have done with this flow chart, because it turned out to be Venus :-)