I have recently started guiding and its a game changer for me anyway so thought I'd try dithering it took out about a 1 megapixel chunk out of the frame on the first dither cycle.Not good!
I am using a 530mm main scope with a 533mc camera and a QHY Miniguidescope with a Lodestar X2 camera. All on a Vixen SXD2 Mount.
I can do the trial and error but surely there is a way to calculate how much dither to set, I have PHD2 at default 1.
Appreciate ant ideas, solutions. Yes a larger guidescope might help but I have to move my gear every night.
I don’t use Sharpcap pro but I read a few posts in the Sharpcap forum and they mentioned it will only dither in Live stacking mode ??
I use APT which is set up perfectly for dither commands from PHD2 and has a dither setting table you can use to calculate your total dither
Generally as a rule of thumb you want to dither about 8 to 10 pixels in each frame
A/ Calculate your Main Imaging Camera pixel scale -
Camera Pixel size uM x 206.3 / focal length of telescope = ?? arc sec per pixel
B/ Calculate your Guide Camera pixel scale -
Camera Pixel size uM x 206.3 / focal length of guide scope = ?? arc sec per pixel
Divide A over B to get your multiplier or ratio C
Set dither scale to 1 in PHD2
Find out in Sharpcap Pro it’s dither command scale ( if it even has one ?? )
For Example -
Dither 1 = 0.5 pixel
Dither 2 = 1.0 pixel
Dither 3 = 2.0 pixel
And so on.....
And then multiply C and a Sharpcap Dither scale to end up with a pixel amount close to 8 to 10 pixels
Appreciate the detailed description,
I mainly use Sharpcap as it doubles as a live stack and i can still save the raw frames. Not sure it has a dither scale either will check.
I do have APT will give that one a go as well, was doing ok till i enabled dither just a matter of getting the right settings I guess.