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Scott,
Good thinking, every bit helps.
I'll make a couple of suggestions that will go a long way to further improving accuracy:
* Not set up on turf. Turf yields in different directions depending on where the scope is pointed, as does the soil. Plus the turf changes in consistency depending on how long and how much moisture is in the ground. Turf also expires A LOT of moisture at night, and unless your gear is made out of high grade plywood that is also appropriately varnished, this moisture and dew will have detrimental effects on your scope and gear.
* If you set up on concrete or other permanent hard surface, you can take your time to make some permanent and very accurate markings on it to indicate true north. This leaves absolutely nothing to chance when you need to remove your gear from the observing area. "Etched in stone" so to speak. Some people do this also for their astrophoto gear that they need to set up everytime in order to use it. Some people have even gone to the trouble of hiring a professional surveyor to produce these markings for them.
* You might like to place a bullseye bubble level on the rocker box of your dob. This will also greatly increase the accuracy of all your readings. You can fashion a set of levelling screws/legs on the platform. The appliance levelling feet used under stoves and the such are one such gizmo to give you an idea.
* To eliminate guess work from reading the az dial, you can put a block on the platform over the "0" north mark with a little arrow coming off it that points to the dial. It's all a matter of eliminating parallax error.
The more accurate you can make things, the better the quality of the readings. Before the advent of digital setting circles, manual setting circles were used to find stuff (if not by star hopping), for both amateur and professional astronomers. Key to the accuracy of these manual setting circles is getting everything right in terms of gear stability and accuracy of alignment. Get either one of these too off, and it's bye-bye pointing accuracy.
Alex.
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