https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude#Satellites_of_Jupiter wrote:
<<In 1612, having determined the orbital periods of Jupiter's four brightest satellites (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto), Galileo proposed that with sufficiently accurate knowledge of their orbits one could use their positions as a universal clock, which would make possible the determination of longitude. He worked on this problem from time to time during the remainder of his life.
The method required a telescope, as the moons are not visible to the naked eye. For use in marine navigation, Galileo proposed the celatone, a device in the form of a helmet with a telescope mounted so as to accommodate the motion of the observer on the ship. This was later replaced with the idea of a pair of nested hemispheric shells separated by a bath of oil. This would provide a platform that would allow the observer to remain stationary as the ship rolled beneath him, in the manner of a gimballed platform. To provide for the determination of time from the observed moons' positions, a Jovilabe was offered — this was an analogue computer that calculated time from the positions and that got its name from its similarities to an astrolabe. The practical problems were severe and the method was never used at sea.
On land, this method proved useful and accurate. An early example was the measurement of the longitude of the site of Tycho Brahe's former observatory on the Island of Hven. Jean Picard on Hven and Cassini in Paris made observations during 1671 and 1672, and obtained a value of 42 minutes 10 seconds (time) east of Paris, corresponding to 10° 32' 30", about 12 minute of arc higher than the modern value.
Two proposed methods depend on the relative motions of the moon and a star or planet. An appulse is the least apparent distance between the two objects, an occultation occurs when the star or planet passes behind the moon — essentially a type of eclipse. The times of either of these events can be used as the measure of absolute time in the same way as with a lunar eclipse. Edmond Halley described the use of this method to determine the longitude of Balasore, using observations of the star Aldebaran (the Bull's Eye) in 1680, with an error of just over half a degree. A longitude determination using the occultation of a planet, Jupiter, was described by James Pound in 1714.
The first to suggest travelling with a clock to determine longitude, in 1530, was Gemma Frisius, a physician, mathematician, cartographer, philosopher, and instrument maker from the Netherlands. The clock would be set to the local time of a starting point whose longitude was known, and the longitude of any other place could be determined by comparing its local time with the clock time. While the method is perfectly sound, and was partly stimulated by recent improvements in the accuracy of mechanical clocks, it still requires far more accurate time-keeping than was available in Frisius's day. The term chronometer was not used until the following century, and it would be over two centuries before this became the standard method for determining longitude at sea.>>