MARQ Astronomer?

It’s not going to happen for a lot of reasons.

dark adaptation. Using a telescope for visual observation requires a dark adapted eye and a smart watch or smartphone screen immediate destroys that.

processing power. Expecting a watch to provide on the fly tracking would require a lot of processing power. Plus the screen is way too small and low resolution to be useful.

navigation. Why use a smart watch with gps to navigate just by using it to point out Polaris. Besides, there’s no bright equivalent of Polaris for the southern sky, as below the equator Polaris is invisible.

and.... why put a solar panel on a watch designed for night use?

Wow, I've never heard of an astronomer denying space flight before! So when you point your telescope (or even your naked eye on a good night) at the given position for the ISS, what is it you're seeing?  All those channels that you pick up on your TV satellite dish, where are they coming from?  Where are GPS signals coming from?

night mode still needs light. How the hell do you see the watch :) 

the screen is too small, processor to weak. That’s the long and short of it. And how do you accurately show constellations and names on a 1.3” 260*260 or 280*280 screen .

why even bother with astronomical navigation at all when to be able to show which constellations are available GPS is essential? That’s like having a smartphone and using the led flash to talk to people by morse code.

BTW. My PhD is in star formation. So I have heard of the moon. And you’re howling at it

And how do you know where the moon is the sky at any particular point of time?

You need your exact position, and time. For that, you need GPS.

So you have a watch which can use satellites (launched via space flight) to accurately determine position to under a metre, and able to get accurate time to the millisecond ... to tell you how to get to another position from lines on a 1.3" watch and trying to find them on the  sky.

1) if you have any basic knowledge of the sky, you can do it without the watch
2) if you don't you're expected to trace out lines from a minute, low resolution display!

Mapping works on watch because the display and mapping is inherently 1 dimensional. You plot out a map with its centre based on your gps position, then use the compass to get one number (heading) to align the map direction.

To display a sky map you need to now add a second dimensional, to be able to rotate where you're looking, because you're now looking at azimuth AND altitude. And you can only do that with accelerometers because there's no analog to the compass heading in this case.

THEN you need enough processing power to keep the display in real time.

THEN You realise that the display is low resolution that you can even have a reasonably accurate view of a very small area, or a large view with poor quality. Then you add in star names, constellation names and you have pretty much a mess on a screen

MARQ Astronomer said:

Navigation with stars isn't just by polaris but lots of constellations.

Considering the sky rotates (from our point of view) around the celestial poles, it can be that Leo (as an example) is due west at one time and due east another. Astronomical navigation, and all navigation, relies on reference to fixed points. Th only two fixed points in the sky are the two celestial poles.

And ironically, astronomical navigation relied on sextants etc to get latitude, but to get longitude required increasing accurate clocks. So why go backwards when you can just use the source of that highly accurate time, the GPS constellation of satellites, to do their thing and give you the position without faffing about.