On The Believability of Polar Spots

P.B. Byrne

Polar spots in Doppler Imaging maps of rapidly rotating late-type stars, especially the active components of RS CVn binaries, represent a major break with the solar paradigm, within which spots are only found at low latitudes. I examine critically the evidence for polar spots and point out that they are particularly sensitive to a number of systematic effects relating to determining reference ``zero-points''.