Confused? lat and logtitude

[daiwelly]

Hi I am looking for advice I am using synscan on my scope I had problem over the weekend telescope not aligning correctly, I have checked my lat and lontgitude for my home base from google earth, if I then go to google maps and put them coords in it ends up in america somewhere, but if I convert these reading to decimal then go on google maps puts me bang on my home base so which do I use decimal or hrs & mins etc?

[adamw]

Hi. I am not sure if this helps you but on my skywatcher syncscan handsets for a google maps lat/long reading of 51.74 & -3.29 i would enter N51.74 & W3.29.

[TwoPi]

You use degrees and minutes in the Synscan.

Just looked at Fochriw in Google Maps and the latitude / longitude comes up as 51° 44' 26.48", -3° 17' 53.67", so rounding the minutes for SynScan (it doesn't use seconds) would be 3° 18' W (the - sign means W rather than E) and 51° 44' N. I've put them that way around as I think it asks you for longitude first.

BTW, the way I found the latitude and longitude from Google Maps was to right click on the map and choose What's Here? Clicking on the resultant green arrow gives you the lat & long in both decimal and degree/mins/secs form.

Hope this helps.

[mallorcasaint]

It should be entered in Degrees and Minutes. You can find an accurate Lat and Long in degrees and mins here: itouchmap.com

[TwoPi]

Hi. I am not sure if this helps you but on my skywatcher syncscan handsets for a google maps lat/long reading of 51.74 & -3.29 i would enter N51.74 & W3.29.

The .74 and .29 are decimals, for the SynScan I think you need to convert the decimals to minutes of arc (at least you do in mine!).