Lost at sea with no forms of navigation other than the stars. How can you use the stars to navigate?

Here's the scenario:

You are on a boat somewhere in the ocean and all of a sudden for some mysterious reason all forms of navigation are broken.
Its just you, the boat and the night sky.

The constellations are not familiar to you and the Big dipper and little dipper cannot be found. How can you use the stars visible to you to navigate?

A MacLean
If the two dippers can't be found then you are probably in the southern hemisphere. In that case fing the Southern Cross and that will give you an rough idea where south it. Obviously north will be in the opposite direction.

mike1942f
Make up names for a few patterns of stars you can see near the horizon in each of the 4 directions ("Three stars on diagonal" "Bunch of Fuzzy") and note them. 20 minutes later observe them again. Those nearest the east will be higher in the sky, those to the west will be lower or out of sight are to the west. Those shifted counter-clockwise are to the north, while those south are shifted clockwise.
If you happened to make a poor choice and got NW, SE, etc. you might pick some new "constellations" closer to the points. You have a 50% chance that the moon is in the sky and for more than half the night it will be distinctly east or west of straight overhead. For guidance. You can use the height of the moon when overhead to determine your latitude if you can fake a protractor or do rough trig interpolation.
With caution you can head toward the nearest shore known to you and when you get close.

Philip J
If you know how to find Polaris, and you're in the northern hemisphere, you can easily measure your latitude.

To find your longitude, you need an accurate clock; one minute of error in time equals 1/4 degree of error in longitude. And you'll need to know the right ascension of at least one bright star which you can see. For accurate measurement, you'll need to construct something like a sextant.

The Polynesians can tell the directions of particular islands by observing the waves.

What do you think? Answer below!

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