SectionHiker.com Backpacking Gear Reviews and FAQs 
Learning to use a compass to tell if you’re hiking in the right direction is quite simple and useful for any hiker. For example, if you get turned around on a hiking trail and don’t know which direction you’re facing (north, south, east, or west), you can use a compass to orient yourself and the top of your map, which is always north. While the orientation won’t be an exact match (for technical reasons I don’t want to get into here), it’s usually good enough in North America and the United Kingdom to get you headed in the right direction if you stick to established hiking trails.
First, hold the compass flat in front of you in the palm of your hand or flat on the ground and note the direction that the floating needle (which is usually colored red) is pointing to: that is north. You can ignore the compass dial and all the markings on the rest of the compass – they’re irrelevant to this task. No matter how you turn the compass (as long as you keep it flat), that floating arrow will always point north. If you line up the left edge of your map so it’s parallel to the arrow, the left-hand side of the map will be west, the right hand will be east, the top will be north, and the bottom will be south. Try it.
This is good information.
One thing to note… Your photos show the compass on what appears to be a picnic table. (Probably to make it easier to see in the photos.) The nails/screws that hold the table together are most likely metal. Being magnetic, your compass might not point north if it’s too close to something metal. Best to hold it in your hand while using it. It can cause a much bigger error than you would think.
Actually its my back deck.
From my perspective a table or a deck is better than hand holding — not that it is an option in any practical situation. With all those parallel lines you can move the compass around and see what range of deflection the fasteners are causing. When I’m hand holding I have to remember to put my camera, which is usually hanging right where hands are and contains an unknown amount of metal, out of the way . I’ll have to try the experiment sometime. It would be good to quantify the effect of small amounts of metal.
I’ve gotten tuned around on the trail more than one time. Easier to do than I would have thought. But the map and compass got me going in the right direction, with confidence. Good article.
You still have to keep your brain engaged. I once was using a compass to keep my self headed straight while walking a couple of hundred yards off the trail through puckerbrush to check a river. I wanted to see how close it was to flooding. It was raining, the ground was marshy, the puckerbrush was thick, and the mosquitos were driving me crazy. (That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.) On the way back I used the “easy” trick of reversing the needle direction rather than changing the course setting by 180 degrees. Half way back I found that I had gotten 90 degrees off course, so I re-aligned the needle and continued. When the river appeared in front of me I was so astonished that it took me about 10 seconds of staring at the river to realize that it was real and that I had forgotten to keep the needle reversed. Two decades later I can still see that river whenever I decide to use the reverse-the-needle trick.
I tried it and it even worked with my whistle/thermometer/compass on a key chain. So, the compass alone won’t get you where you need to go and your map alone won’t either. You need both. Very interesting. And helpful.
And everything having to do with a compass/map, is derived from this one simple elementary skill. Glad you tried it.