Jim--
I'll take a stab at this.
First, star charts do not invert images west to east (except for historically old charts like the original uranometria, which pictures the stars on a sphere as viewed from the outside). Modern star charts show the stars in their "correct" orientation, that is, how we view them looking at the celestial sphere from inside, so to speak. Let's assume we're in the northern hemisphere. If you go outside and look up, while facing south so as to view the celestial equator at meridian, west really is on your right, and north is up, counterclockwise from west, just as represented on your chart. If you face north, the situation is harder to grasp: relative to polaris, for a star at 3 o'clock, west is up; for a star at 6 o'clock, west is right; for a star at 9 o'clock, west is down; for a star at 12 o'clock, west is left. In general, west is the direction stars move in the eyepiece of an undriven scope. So for any star chart that includes polaris, west is basically a tangent vector in the counter-clockwise direction.
Moving on to your other questions: a dobsonian preserves the orientation of the sky, but rotates it 180 degrees (two reflections equals a rotation), so up appears down and left appears right. But north is still counter-clockwise from west, as in the star chart. That's an important principle when star-hopping in a dob: you find west by letting a star or other target drift--then north is 90 degrees counter-clockwise.
A refractor with a star diagonal (one reflection) will invert the orientation. If you look through one on an alt-azimuth mount, the effect will be to preserve up and down but flip left to right. North now is clockwise from west.
Most right angle finders are correct image finders, so the view in them looks like the naked eye view.
Hope that helps, and that I didn't make any major errors!
George
George Golitzin
