Hi all,

I tried enabling dithering with KStars/Ekos with last session and then I noticed it takes a long time (and I was under time pressure - aren't we always? ) so I disabled it once I noticed the progress is much slower then anticipated.

Does anybody have any experience with the average duration of dithering and how to set it up to some optimal time?

Maybe it is and I just need to take this time to account but last time it surprised me as I started with 30 seconds subs and most dithering periods were longer then that. Now of course I am sorry I didn't enable dithering at least for 3 minute subs I did after that


My timeline/results are in attached image - you can see dithering as light blue in Guide line - first I had dither every image, then I changed it every 10 images and then I disabled it fully). Also the log shows the dithering took 42 seconds (and wasn't the longest of all).

If you want to speed up dithering, you might try checking the one-pulse dithering option in the guider's dither settings menu.

Hi Jure,

You didn't include a screenshot of your dither settings which would help see whats going on. But here are some ideas...

There are a couple of ways dithering can be setup. If you set a number of pixels (and a threshold) then Ekos will try and move that many pixels and keep trying until you are within the set threshold. This could take 1 or several "attempts" upto whatever you have set as "Max. Iterations".

If you check the "One Pulse Dither" then Ekos ignores the threshold and has 1 go at moving the requested number of pixels.

So if everything is working perfectly these 2 methods will amount to the same thing. If things are not so good then method 1 will take several pulses which will take longer than method 2.

So to speed things up set "One Pulse Dither". The potential downside though is that if, for example, you want 5 pixels of dither and the pulse only moves 1 pixel then you'll get 1 pixel of dither.

There's also a "Settle" time which you may have set. If so, you could experiment with lowering the value.

Hope this helps!

Kind of on-topic - I’ve puzzled over why the ‘drunken walk’ multi step dither was ever required. Is it to mitigate the chance of the guide star being lost if a large jump was made in one go - so by making multiple small steps the guide star(s) could be retained until threshold was reached.

It seems to me that a single random jump (random direction) to threshold is actually the same as multiple random steps (drunken walk) to threshold.

Thanks

Hi Hy,

Thanks for prompt response! I will try with one-pulse dithering next time.

Thanks for all the work you put into this project, I have to say it's amazing and I love using it eventhough I am just a beginner. Don't want to move to anything else