OpenPHD - what does settling indicate if dithering is off?

[g__day (Matthew)]

Wondering what does settling indicate - especially when guiding is normally pretty close to perfect each night - and I have told both imaging scopes camera guide control (SGP and APT) not to dither.

What is going on if its not clouds or cable snags etc?

My gear is in a back yard astro lab - remote controlled from within the house. Three Williams Optics refractors on Losmandy rails attached to an old Vixen Atlux controlled by a Skysensor2000-PC (set to polar aligned mode, with PEC and target based refraction compensation active - if that matters) on a large pier attached to a very large block of concrete under the lab.

Regarding polar alignment - The SkyX and Tpoint says is pretty much perfect - about a tenth of an arc second under the refracted South Celestial Pole - guiding three moderately heavy scopes, focusers, filter wheels and cameras is routinely great - corrections about +/- .025 arc second and trivial drift per minute to correct out. So its only this settling that has me puzzled.

Next session I might observe guiding with APT or SGP inactive to see if one of both of them are actually issuing dither commands when I have tried very hard to tell them not too!

Many thanks, Matthew

[g__day (Matthew)]

Wondering if it could be related to SGP settling post dithering - even though dithering is not enabled?

APT has dithering in this plan and auto dithering turned off!

[g__day (Matthew)]

APT plan setting - for completeness

Going through these logs - I think the behaviour started on 15th May - when I connected APT and SGP to PHD2

[g__day (Matthew)]

In SGP I see this - straight after an image was taken - seems to point the finger squarely at SGP...

[g__day (Matthew)]

I also have this debug log

[Startrek (Martin)]

Have you posted your issue on the open PHD2 forum ?

https://groups.google.com/g/open-phd-guiding

I’ve been a member for 4 years and have resolved many issues with the group over that time.

Bruce and others are always interested in new problems arising from PHD2 being open and launched by acquisition software like SGP and APT

Me I prefer to run PHD2 as a standalone application and only use APT to send a dither command. Less links to break in the daisy chain

Cheers
Martin