If you have not yet migrated to a glass cockpit equipped aircraft, David Megginson, the blogger behind the Land and Hold Short blog, has a post that is a great cheat sheet for understanding where the needles should be on analog (steam) gauges. After all and as David pointed out, many pilots just look at the position of the needle rather than actually “read” the gauges. Hence, David created the following useful graphics:
Altimeter: IFR
Altimeter: VFR
Airspeed Indicator
Vertical Speed Indicator
David went into considerable detail about each of the above sets of graphics plus at the end of his post, he noted that even pilots with fancy glass cockpits tend to not read the numbers on their displays and instead, opt to just set a bug on the displays.
Every glider pilot knows that last VSI indication: kick-ass lift!