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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

What makes you say that? After some months or years of finding Mars and Jupiter in the sky it became second nature to me. You can just judge the time, don’t need a clock, look up at the sky and spot things immediately. If you’ve been practicing every day for a long time why not?

Yes they also move in the sky but you get that too. You’ll think, oh it’s April and 11pm, I know where mars is instinctively.

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Now you know why navigators on ships (before the chronograph) were highly paid positions.

The nautical almanac is just superb to me, based on its age. https://thenauticalalmanac.com/Everything_You_Need_For_2024....

If you ever need to exercise your cartography, astronomy and navigational skills, I highly recommend learning to use a sextant.

The sentence "Then I can’t remember how I would locate Sagittarius each day" and also absence of any elaboration on how the galactic center is calculated.

If you can't remember why even mention it ?

I built up the intuition 10 years before the 2021 post -- it's a while back so my memory is fuzzy. But once you've got the ecliptic, you're most of the way there: you can visualise where the Earth is in its orbit based on the time of year, and Sgr A* is in a fixed direction relative to the Solar System.

Build up to it, a few minutes waiting for the bus every day, checking your sense with an app like Star Walk... it's relatively straightforward. I've learnt harder things I'm sure.

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