go-to question

when you set up your go-to mount, even though some use a gps today- do you use whatever apparant time it is, or your precise local mean time? im 18 minutes off wall clock time and never tried a comparison yet

Whatever the time is for your time zone. My guess is the hand controller converts that to GMT (or UTC) for use at your particular location.

I just use whatever time it is on my cell phone and realistically a few minutes difference is nothing compared to being unlevel, a poor polar alignment, not being balanced, and a lot of other factors.

The time on your cell phone, if it's been turned on recently, should be very accurate. My first thought was that being off would only impact the RA of the mounts first point at an alignment star, but I don't really know. It would be interesting to do some tests to see which factors are the most detrimental to accurate pointing.

i was thinking the same thing, if its clear this week-end, ill try a series 1st star go-to's with different time settings

Well you can always compensate for being off a few minutes with the time by doing the star alignment correctly, that's what it's for.

With my CG5ASGT mount, if your not accurate with entering the time, you will just have to slew more to center your alignment stars, the more your off in time, the more you will need to slew to re-center the first two alignment stars

I have noticed this in the past, just because I forgot about daylight savings time, the first two were off by about 1 arc hour.

After re-setting and entering the the right time the alignment stars were within the field of my finder scope.