One interesting side effect of learning celestial nav is you can&#x27;t avoid learning some astronomy and keeping up to date on the night sky.<p>Another side effect is its a filter on people who can&#x27;t handle math or can&#x27;t handle complicated written procedures.  Its unclear how important that is, but it is clear its a very good filter if you value those skills for other reasons.<p>With respect to situational awareness, its very easy to own a GPS while confusing that attribute of ownership with understanding where you are, but its very hard to mentally do celestial nav without understanding where you are, what are the present sea and weather conditions.  Also there is a difference between merely owning a (possibly GPS accurate) clock or chronometer and understanding what time it is.  &quot;I own things that could provide accurate 4 dimensional situation, were I to actually understand the outputs&quot; is a lot different from &quot;I can perform extensive labor and calculations with the result of being deeply aware of my 4 dimensional situation&quot;