hi i thinck i maybe asking a daft question here but when i read about setting up an eq mount everthing says to basicly line up the mount to the north and to have the pole star in the polar scope. when i do this with a compass the pole star is off to thenorth east so i can never get close to it being in the polar scope.have i got a dodgy compass or am i doing some thing wrong

i have a 6" 1200f scope on a eq3-2 mount
live on the east coast of uk
about 52deg longatude

There are very few places on Earth where "magnetic" north is the same as "true" north! If you have the pole star in the polar scope, it would be more correct to say that "magnetic" north is "off to the northwest". If Polaris is in the field of view of the polar finder, you are within 3/4 degree of "true" north!

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If you are using the scope for only visual viewing or planetary photography with very short exposure time (a couple seconds at most) then there's no need to get at all picky about polar alignment. For many years I just rolled the scope out, eyeballed it to see if it was pointed north and it looked like the polar axis was pointed to the height of Polarirs. To do this I just stood a few feet south of the mount and looked at its general configuration. Whole process took 30 seconds. That was plenty good enough for keeping the object in the eyepiece at high power for as long as I ever needed, even with neighborhood star parties with all the neighbors dropping by for a look. For a moon photo taken with this approximate (within maybe 5 degrees) polar alignment see:
http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org/...johnson-02.jpg

For long exposure piggy back photography putting Polaris somewhere in the pole finder scope is sufficient. For long exposure deep sky photography then fine tune that with drift alignment after following the instructions for offsetting polaris in the finder scope.

Don't worry about the compass, its only to help you find Polaris in the scope in the first place. I have so much iron in the ground up here a compass can point south, west or any random direction. They are useless here. They were useless on my drive as well. It had rebar in the concrete. The compass was very confused and useless there too. You only give an aproximate location. If near Ipswitch the deviation is only about 1.5 degrees west. It sounds like you are seeing far more than that. If so you are being hit by local conditions, natural or manmade as I am.

You can look it up if interested at:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomagmodel...alcDeclination

thanks for the replies i think ive got this now ill give it ago tonight if the sky clears i live just a bit north of ipswich (lincolnshire) tho i go there at least once a month to see me mam. going to take the scope with me next time. not upto the point of photography yet (£££££££)

north is north der

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