Polynesian voyaging navigation uses no instruments and does not use a chart. What it uses is a star compass: a memorised set of rising and setting points around the horizon, each identified by a named star, and a sequence of stars that rise at the same bearing one after another through the night, so that as one climbs too high to be useful the next takes its place.
That requires an enormous amount held in the head. A navigator learns the rising and setting bearings of a large number of stars, the seasonal changes, the swell patterns, the flight of land-finding birds, cloud behaviour over islands, and the reference island method by which the canoe's position is tracked against an island not visible and not on the route.
The tradition was very nearly lost. Its survival ran through a small number of holders, notably Mau Piailug of Satawal in the Carolines, who navigated Hokule'a from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1976 without instruments and then taught the method to Hawaiian and other Polynesian students against the practice of his own community, on the ground that it would otherwise die with him.
The voyaging revival that followed is one of the reasons the sky figures are documented at all, and it makes the astronomy a living practice rather than an ethnographic record.