Hi Liana,
Magnetic North and true North are not the same. My partner is a physics teacher and he can explain it better than I can! There is an angular deviation on your compass between magnetic North (which the compass points to) and true North. For example: I live in Melbourne Australia and the declination here is 11 degrees East. So I take the reading and rotate the compass 11 degrees East! to get the true reading. Does this make sense? I Googled (got to love them!) for declination of Melbourne, had to search a bit, but found it quite easily.
Hope this helps you some more.
nlac
