Setting your location on a go-to mount - DOH!!

[rocketandroll]

Hi folks

Thought I'd share this little gem having learnt the hard way last night...

It's a simple mistake to make, but one that can mess up your whole evening!

Most go-to or computer-controlled mounts will ask you for your viewing location (lat/long) when you are setting up.

Last night I was at a new site and looked up the lat/long via Google. I input the figures but the mount kept rejecting it?

In the end I had to put a close (but incorrect) figure in before it'd work.

It was only when I got home that the penny dropped....

Whilst lat/long is always given in degrees... there are two ways of expressing that value... the first is in degrees, minutes and seconds (the way telescope mounts work) in which case the max value after degrees is .59. The other way is in decimal fractions of a degree, in which case the highest value after the full degrees is .99.

I was trying to input a value of 52.92 degrees into a system only set up to accept values below .60.

To correct this, if you only have the decimal value, times 60 by the decimal value to get the minutes value, and round it to two figures...

eg: my value of .92 should have been 60 X 0.92= 55

So I should have inputted 52.55 degrees as the value.

Hope that helps someone else as it was driving me mad!!!!

Ben

[S.A.M]

Very good point, I have done this in the past. Being human does mean the odd mistake or two!

Peter

[hemihaggis]

yep i is guilty of that also

[scarecrow]

Yeap done the same

[ScubaMike]

Same here.

I then went on to try and put in my Longditude as 358 55' 00". Which of course it wouldn't accept.

It should have been 1 05' 00" *then* tell it W(est).

Wouldn't mind, but I had to work out the positive value as I had it as -1 05' 00" and couldn't see where to put a minus in.

[Vega]

Also you can use this two-way online converter...

;-)

[JohnC64]

my mistake on first time using my mount was to swap the day and month values around when entering the date- and then wondered why i couldn't get it to align

[ecosse]

Good to know thanks for sharing