Hi, Madam/Sir:
I am newbie on Ekos. I have a question is the dither setting is on the guide section. I have no the guide system on the second mount. How could I set the dither in Ekos?
Thanks in advance!
arided

Can you elaborate more about your system and request? It's not clear.

My equipment is
Controller hardware: raspberry pi ubintu 16.04
Control software : ekos
mount: CEM60 via USBTo232
camera: EOS 6D

I second that! I also don't' have an auto-guider but would love the ability to dither. It was suggested to me that I write a python script to move the mount in between captures but I'm not sure I have the time nor knowledge to do this. It would certainly be a great feature to do this without a auto-guider. I image with a 300mm lens.

Cheers

Richard

Isn't the mount sort-of dithering because it's not being autoguided? Unless you have a top-of-the-line mount then it's probably moving slightly as you image?

That's likely the case indeed, however it wouldn't be random I think and not as predictable. On the other hand, extra dithering on top of that would likely cause more headaches than it does any good.

I plan on looking into implementing this as it is very useful, especially when shooting grossly undersampled with a SLR lens. Most mounts can track well enough and with newer CMOS cameras you may only need 30-60s LRGB exposures anyways. For example, I use a 100mm lens with my ASI1600MM and I have no need for a guider with this configuration. I'd just like to have the mount bump randomly with an amplitude of 10-20 arc-seconds every 10 minutes or so.

Dithering can considerably improve the usefulness of pixel rejection routines when stacking so I consider this an important feature to have.

I would like to jump on this bandwagon as well. My 10Micron mount does not need guiding. SGP, CCD Auto Pilot, TSX all have the ability to do unguided dithering. Having the ability to do this and also set the amount of dither would be excellent. Low, medium, high, ultra-high or set by pixels or arc-seconds manually.

I started to look at this but got side-tracked. Maybe after the Eclipse excitement is over.

I was probably going to roll it into the Guide/Dithering setup in Kstars/Ekos but I'm somewhat dissatisfied with that as it has nothing to do with Guiding. But probably where people would look for it first?

If you consider the way Sequence Generator Pro handles this you will see it is under guiding set up where guide type has a selection called "Direct Mount Guiding" which essentially indicates the mount handles guiding itself. Then there is a dithering option that shows how much dithering you want to deal with.

Here is what it looks like.

I have been trying this out the last week and it is working perfectly.

My intention is to have all this installed on my Raspberry Pi 3 where it does everything I need so I don't have to bring a laptop. I have a light weight, low power method of imaging. Right now as it stands there are two things that are stopping me from going all-in with Ekos. 1) I need a way to do mount modeling which I am being told is being worked on currently YAY! and 2) dithering without guiding which you say you will work on at some point. Once both those things are accomplished I don't think I will need any other software to do it all.

I'd add my vote for this feature - this is really useful in the case where you're not actually guiding (widefield DSLR work for instance), but want to dither to allow pixel rejection routines to get rid of artefacts (hot pixels, column defects, etc). Both my GM8 and Titan can drive well within the pixel tolerance for wide angle lenses, so they need forcibly dithering.

APT also allows this by two methods - the first uses a direct mount connection to do a small goto, randomly distanced from the start point, the second uses pulse guiding to do the same. For both it uses a numerical parameter and the pixel scale to decide how much to dither.

It's be great to implement this in Ekos - I too could go to a complete RPi/indi/Ekos setup for DSLR work with this implemented

I just added support for the non-guide dither in Ekos.