Former military aerospace engineer here. In my opinion it would only be worth it on long range strategic bombers such as the B-52.

Fighters don't have the legs to fly far enough that celestial navigation becomes worth the added complexity.

For other air mobility platforms like the C-130 or C-17 in my experience they do not include these features, as GPS, INS, and regular old "ask ATC for a vector" are usually good enough.

There are ongoing experiments with magnetic and other forms of navigation, some of which are classified, but I'm a civilian now so I don't know any specifics.

Knew an old guy who was a navigator in C-130's back in the late 1960s. He used celestial navigation.

You are probably right that this went away sometime in the 1970s.

Damn, now I'm feeling old. I miss the stars.

Your friend probably looked out the skylight and actually oriented himself on the stars' positions.

I'm saying something different, which is that unlike the SR-71, the C-130 didn't and doesn't have an instrument that scans the sky and automatically determines where it is based on the constellations it can see.

Is one of them dead reckoning using polarized light the way bees do?

Dead reckoning using the pilot's ego as a guide.

Still used in spacecraft, a vendor: https://www.ball.com/aerospace/capabilities/technologies-com...

What’s actually on aircraft tends to be classified.

It's wild that they're also a household name in the form of mason jars.

And for some, the Ball State University. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_State_University

And also aluminum cans. For a while, the jars and cans side of the business made money while Ball Aerospace was kept around for nostalgia.

In space they still use similar methods. A different division of a company I used to work for built star trackers for satellites.

Astronomically corrected INS[1] is definitely still a thing in aerospace in general. I have no knowledge of whether or not they are in modern military aircraft though.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system

I think we're seeing similar, or equivalent, technology being used in Ukraine right now. The Russians routinely jam GPS frequencies and have been doing so for years/decades (one of the few things the Russian military is considered good at).

Yet we see Ukraine doing precision strikes not only with long-range missiles, but also with all kinds of drones.