Star pattern matching is critical when using high-precision astronomical positioning technique， which， in turn， is required for the precise determination of space objects’ orbits. This paper proposes a rapid star-pattern-matching method for precisely tracking telescopes， including its principles， program flow and implementation. First， the catalog of pointed sky region was filtered out with the shafting positioning from the encoder； then， after selection and reduction， the stars in the area were compiled into a navigation stars list. After which， the optimized triangle matching method， based on dimension reduction and table look-up methods， was employed in the first frame， where the relation between plate constants verifies the success of matching. The changes of the telescope pointing were considered to calculate the standard coordinates of navigation stars， and the observed stars were matched through the last plate constants. Finally， the coordinates of navigation stars calculated were compared by the plate constants with their reduced values from the catalog， and the position of one space object was calculated through celestial positioning. Experimental results indicated that 39 star pairs could be matched by applying the optimized triangle matching proposed， however， with only approximately 1/300 of the time taken compared to the conventional method. When calculating the following sequential frames （approximately 100 star pairs per-frame）， the matching could be finished in less than 0.04 s. The matched star pairs obtained by the rapid star pattern matching algorithm were used to locate an MEO laser satellite with an average error of approximately 0.5″. As a result， the method proposed fully satisfies the requirements of high accuracy and speed in astronomical positioning for precisely tracking telescopes.