[harwayharry (Wayne)]

I live in Port Macquarie and use a 12" Lightbridge with Argo Navis for my serious viewing but just bought a Meade StarNavigator 102 guided refractor to use on the deck for casual viewing and for visitors. This scope calls for a "home" setup based on aligning with the North Star.

I have no experience of this sort of scope or alignment and no idea how I align on an unobservable star or what I need to do to fix this (or if I need to bother at all).

I assume (correctly?) that the alignment is for auto tracking purposes and, as I don't intend to use this for imaging, only observing, I guess a ball-park alignment will do the job - but what do I align with and how do I account for being in the southern hemisphere??

Will appreciate help - have read the sticky notes on SCP alignment but they don't seem to address the north/south issue and there is nothing I can find on the Meade site.