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Polar Alignment Scope madness
Is it me or is every southern hemisphere polar alignment scope reticle etched incorrectly? Mine has the Octans "trapezium" etched into it along with pointers to Eri-a and Cru-a. But Eri-a is shown as being at the projection of an imaginary line from tau Octans through sigma Octans, and Cru-a is roughly in the opposite direction. According to every star chart I can get my hands on, the directions to Cru-a and Eri-a are reversed. So I began to think I had a strange, wrongly etched reticle. Maybe even a rare once-off error.
I then started to look up on the www to see what other scopes have on their reticles. A search on "octans reticle" came up with a few hits and every one that had the Cru-a and Eri-a pointers has them the wrong way around. Admittedly they may have all come out of the same factory but even then there must be a lot of incorrect reticles out there. (Not that it really matters other than to a pedant like me). Has anyone else noticed this?
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