[g__day (Matthew)]

After a raging battle trying to successfully drift align my permanently mounted mount, I sat down with a pencil and paper and thought through the advice I was getting to reach a stunning conclusion - it was wrong!

A quick google on "drift alignment southern hemisphere" brought up alot of links, and it was interesting to see how they described correcting for lattitude - about 1/3 inverted the direction you should take to correct DEC drift, and about 1/3 where poor in describing direction of drift.

I am pleased to say the article on IIS got it right, but talk about tear your hair out following incorrect advice and thinking you are going batty!

As the drift kept getting bigger I simply could not deny what I was seeing. Too a video on drift aligning in the Northern hemisphere had mentioned the direction of lattitude corrections should always take the star back towards its initial position - something that was not occuring with the advice I had printed in black and white to hang on my Astronomy lab wall.

I think from now I will list all the sites that get it wrong and tell them!

The other annoying thing is when a site says if the drift is down or up - instead of North or South. You can ignore movement in RA - so judging from the Central dot of a camera's viewing finder if I see drift North and up - do I compensate the same way if I see drift that is North and down? To my simple mind up / down is West / East - which is to be ignored. North versus South drift is hard to misunderstand!

Firm in my mind now is point East and low to correct elevation mis alignment. Any drift North = raise mount, whilst drift South = lower mount. That plain English would have saved me alot of stress!

Simply maths - what would I see if the mount was at say 10 degrees facing due East at low elevation (instead of elevated to 33 degrees) lead me to understand the advice I had in black and white was wrong.

Isn't it funny how something authorative sound in print is can be treated like holy writ? I remember an Australian Astronomy website that had rough polar alignment advice saying true South was abut 11 degrees West of magnetic South for Sydney. I asked my dad - a retired surveyor and he said no its the opposite - due East. A google again identified two points of view - which I alerted the website owner too - he checked and corrected his advice!

How many other folks have come across inverted advice - should we make a list of mistakes or incorrect thinking to help beginners? I didn't realise quality control was missing on such a fundamental peice of getting started!