A dung ball is contested property, so the fastest way to keep it is to leave the pat in a straight line before rivals arrive. Beetles achieve this by taking a celestial bearing, mounting the ball to perform a short orientation dance, then rolling along a fixed compass heading rather than towards any goal.
By day the cue is the polarisation pattern of sunlight and the sun's position. At night, work published in 2013 tested the nocturnal species Scarabaeus satyrus in a planetarium and found beetles rolled just as straight under a projected Milky Way alone as under a full starfield, and lost their bearing when the sky was blank or their eyes were covered. They were not resolving individual stars, which are too faint, but using the broad band of light.
The finding is often reported as beetles navigating by stars. The mechanism is a straight-line compass with no map and no fixed target, and it does not tell a beetle where it is.