Re: [guide-user] Sarah Celeste, lat/lon output

Bill J Gray Jun 6, 2006

Thanks to all for the congratulations on the arrival of Sarah
Celeste. As Larry deduced, this is indeed our first child... I'd
gotten requests for news and photos from many relatives, and thought
I'd write up the story once, in full detail. Until I saw Bertrand's
post, I didn't realize there was a link to it from the rest of the site.

Bertrand, about getting more digits in lat/lon: I must confess
that there's no way of resetting that, at least at present. (It _was_
in 'strings.dat', long ago; but when I added the capability to display
lat/lon in three different formats, it was moved out of that file.)
If you choose output in decimal degrees (in Settings... RA/Dec Format),
the lat/lon is shown to .0001 degrees, or about 11 meters on the
earth's surface. Select output in degrees/minutes, and it's shown to
.01 arcminutes, or about 19 meters. Select output in
degrees/minutes/seconds, and it's shown to one-arcsecond precision, or
about 31 meters.

For some reason, the first two options get an extra digit in the
Location dialog. So you can at least go there and see the lat/lon to a
precision of 1.1 or 1.9 meters.

-- Bill