Location - accuracy

[noah4x4]

I live 62 miles from London. I use Starsense and input time established from an atomic clock and longitude, latitude.  Compared to selecting "city" (London) I enjoy astonishingly Goto accuracy.

Why compromise when anybody can look at their watch and easily identify longitude/ latitude?

 

[Stub Mandrel]

This is totally spurious. Knowing time , latitude and longitude only makes it easier for the scope to polar align and stops it pointing in silly directions. Once polar aligned they have no impact on where the scope points greater than the error in the location, so yes a gross error could make it hard to find craters on the moon and a smaller error could stop you finding the ISS.

But for anything beyond the orbit of Mars?

If your location is 60 miles out and you tell the mount to look at a nebula 100 light-years across, or even Jupiter, does it really matter if your scope is pointing 60 or even 1,000 miles away from its centre point?

[BGazing]

Used synscaninnit last night to dial in precise coordinates and time for evo 8 handset and did a quick solar align on the moon for the kids. The tracking was remarkably accurate for such a quick job.

The more precise the location and time, the less effect there will be if you are not dead center when aligning...

[Stub Mandrel]

I've just had a play with Stellkarium, comparing the DEC for the Moon and Mars as seen from Johannesberg and the UK.

The moon changes by about 1 degree 4 minutes, enough to miss it completely.

Mars changes by just 15 arc-seconds.

I stand by my statement that " Once aligned, you could be anywhere on earth and the goto will work fine (except for really close objects like satellites or the moon) ", also if alignment is done from stars or by plate solving, you location is completely irrelevant.