Optical navigation (OpNav) is the art of navigating spacecraft with camera images. Fundamentals of Spacecraft Optical Navigation (Wiley, 2026) is the first book to treat the subject comprehensively, developing the field from first principles for the people who design, operate, and study these systems.

 

Optical navigation is an interdisciplinary subject. This book synthesizes ideas from disparate but adjacent fields—including aerospace engineering, geometry, astronomy, planetary science, and computer vision—and uses them to build the mathematical models needed to solve real navigation problems. These ideas are brought to life through extensive examples with real spaceflight data and more than 290 illustrations, including both historical diagrams and original artwork.

 

The book is organized into ten chapters, where readers will find:

• the history of optical navigation, drawn from original sources

• the mathematics of projective geometry, developed from the ground up

• spacecraft dynamics, kinematics, and reference frames

• star catalogs, astrometry, and planetary photometry

• optical instrument hardware design

• celestial navigation and terrain relative navigation