The celestial exam for Mate 1600 oceans is the same as for third mate unlimited. It requires a lot of study. I think you need to be able to do any body, except the moon.
Back when I actually did celestial years ago, the moon was one of my favorite bodies.
You don’t actually need to know much math. You need to learn to use tables and/or which buttons to push on the calculator.
The MoT 200 tons oceans requires a lot less knowledge and is pretty simple. You only need to do the sun.
A noonsight is just a bit of addition and subtraction. The sun lines are solved mostly through the use of tables, addition and subtraction, and most importantly careful plotting.
Calculators have only been affordable and in common use for about 50 years. Celestial was done with tables for hundreds of years before that.
The frustrating thing about celestial is that it requires a lot of plotting practice. It’s easy to make errors, math errors, interpolation errors, or plotting errors, but they are hard to find.
You can do a 10 day to two week celestial school for MoT 200.
Mate 1600 celestial school is typically three to four weeks.
It use to be that many people had to go to school twice. I hear that there are some schools where everybody passes the first time and gets a certificate.