The invention relates to a star sensor navigational star screening method by an orthogonal list, comprising the following steps of: 1, carrying out star filtering treatment on the original star catalogue of the whole celestial sphere according to the limit star of a star sensor and the like, and confirming the threshold value Nth of star number; 2, setting the number of the residual stars of the star sensor within a current sky area view field as N, if N is less than or equal to Nth, selecting the residual stars as navigational stars, and carrying out step 3, and if N is larger than Nth, cutting and screening the navigational stars within the current sky area view field by a multi-scale image surface; and 3, after screening of the navigational stars of the current sky area view field is completed, transferring the star sensor to the next position, and repeating the step (2) to screen the navigational stars till going through all the celestial sphere. According to the multi-scale image plane cutting and screening method disclosed by the invention, the redundant stars within a star distribution high intensity sky area can be eliminated along with the star number change of different sky areas, all the stars within a low-intensity sky region can be remained, and the screened navigational stars are evenly distributed.