The professional version of the Atlas used by Astro Gold is used around the world. However, it does require you to enter anywhere in the USA with its state name in the “country” field, and not just to enter “USA”. For instance, you should enter “CA” or “California” (not “USA”) into the “country” field if you want to look up Los Angeles. If you do enter “USA” in the “country” field, and then you will find that Astro Gold tells you that it can’t find either the country or the place. We will consider having the app read “country/state” rather than just “country”, but we cannot easily do this due to the space limitations of such a small screen.

The reason that the ACS uses this different protocol for US places is that there are many duplicate names in different US states, so if the state name is not known it would often result in getting the wrong place. So, the Atlas requires ‘states’ for the USA, and country names for everywhere else, and “country” really means “country or US state name”.