The present disclosure generally relates to methods and devices for determining the attitude of a spacecraft by capturing a photograph of a starry sky, determining at least one potential star from the photograph, extracting for at least one potential star a spot pattern based upon rings having a similar area, searching a database for selecting a list of best candidate stars, verifying if the spot may be positively identified as a reference star by matching the spot with best candidate reference stars from a database, positively identifying at least one potential star, and determining the attitude of the spacecraft based upon at least one positively identified star.