Travel and Discovery - It's Written in the Stars

Since the dawn of time, mankind has gazed up to the stars and dreamt of discovery. These flickering specks in the night sky have enabled us to colonise new lands, develop our cultural intellect and ultimately fuel our desire for travel and discovery both within our own world and beyond.

The earliest encounter of new lands owes its success to the stars. The Aboriginal people of Australia were likely the first to name celestial objects in the night sky, some thousands of centuries before the Egyptians or early Greek astronomers. Their inherent knowledge and appreciation of the stars greatly influenced their ceremonial culture. However, they did not directly practice celestial navigation even though they had the knowledge and means. Instead the Aboriginals developed star maps which acted as a guide to learn and remember waypoints (geographical features of the land), along a travelling a route and navigation of the vast red centre.

Early Discovery

Celestial navigation has itself been an important technique employed by civilisations around the world. For thousands of years, the night sky has guided travellers across the great deserts and oceans. Many of the primary navigation stars have been bequeathed Arabic names due to their significance across the East e.g. Aschere, Suhail, Toliman and Fidis. Without these lanterns of the night the Māori would not have discovered New Zealand on a voyage from eastern Polynesia some 700 years ago. Without sophisticated instruments or maps to consult, these civilisations relied on their unique understanding of the night sky to lead them to new lands. Celestial navigation not only led discovery but also vastly influenced the culture, architecture and ultimately the intellect of the founders of this newly discovered world. For example, the palaces and mountaintop sanctuaries built by the Minoans of Crete have architectural features that align with the rising sun on the equinoxes and the rising and setting of certain stars.

From the earliest of voyages, the stars have been our guide. A constant, flicker of light, against the backdrop of darkness, we owe our sense of travel and wonder to the stars. Despite significant advances in transport and communications, celestial navigation remains an integral part of modern day navigation. Navigators of both sea and air still to this day receive formal training to read and understand the stars.

-But it doesn’t stop there-

Current and Future Discovery

The stars have not only helped us explore our own world but now with advances in technology, are helping us to explore the worlds beyond our own. Space navigation -in inherently complex process- still requires aspects of celestial navigation. The calculation of the trajectory of a space probe within our solar system uses an inertial coordinate system, where a grid is effectively laid over the solar system and fixed to a relative star background. For deeper space, interplanetary missions, the inertial coordinate system along with an origin at the centre of the solar system is used.

So how does a spacecraft know where it is? On-board, along with a menagerie of scientific sensors and equipment, the craft have eyes. Well, not exactly, but they do possess optical sensors and cameras which allow the craft to work out its position based upon its orientation to particular stars. For the aptly named voyager probes, the star tracker on board looked for a very specific, bright star, Canopus. It is approximately 313 light years away and has a mass close to that of our sun. Despite the advances in science and technology, we still rely on the navigation techniques employed by our ancestors thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of years ago.

Travel and discovery is therefore quite literally written in the stars and to this day, remains the fuel for space exploration, scientific advancement and discovery of novel lands.