Someone please explain Dithering to me….🤔

[Stuart1971]

1 hour ago, gorann said:

When I look at your calibrated images I see no walking noise. I expect that dithering would have no noticible effect and I would not worry about it. I have the same camera as you (although the ASI variant) and since I have a quite dark site (Borte 2-3) I have very low noise and never saw anything like walking noise (which was a constant problem during my earlier DSLR era). So I expect that your noise is, as you say, due to light pollution (and dithering would have no effect on that). A drawback with dithering is that you loose imaging time as the mount have to be given time to settle between each frame. Another drawback is of course that it adds one more layer of complexity and one more thing that can go wrong. So, if I was you, I would not worry about dithering. If you do it, make a careful comparison with how it looks with and without dithering, to see if it has any effect at all.

Many thanks for your reply, and I too could not see the walking noise, in the calibrated version, but I wanted a more professional eye, such as yourself, to comment, so thanks for that….👍🏼

[cajen2]

Dithering is when you can't decide which new scope to buy.....🤔😄

Sorry, I'll go away now.

[ollypenrice]

When we started using a dual rig here, dithering became too difficult to entertain. We didn't want to use the same exposure times in both rigs. With set-point cooled CCDs did this matter? Nope. Did we see a significant difference? Nope. Did we conclude that the loss of dithering was underwhelming?  Yes.

However, with some cameras it does make a big difference. Just don't turn it into a religion.

I think that, with a lightweight mount without motorized Dec, you would need a supernatural polar alignment not to be getting natural Dec dither in any case.

Olly

[Stuart1971]

5 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

When we started using a dual rig here, dithering became too difficult to entertain. We didn't want to use the same exposure times in both rigs. With set-point cooled CCDs did this matter? Nope. Did we see a significant difference? Nope. Did we conclude that the loss of dithering was underwhelming?  Yes.

However, with some cameras it does make a big difference. Just don't turn it into a religion.

I think that, with a lightweight mount without motorized Dec, you would need a supernatural polar alignment not to be getting natural Dec dither in any case.

Olly

Thanks Olly, i use an EQ8, and with the backlash it has in DEC, i guide in one direction only in DEC, and it works very well, I have a slight polar misalignment, it’s about 3 arc mins off, so dithering would be problematic, as I can only really do it in RA, and some say that can be worse than not at all, but I have to say, with my IMX571 sensor and perfectly, temp matched darks and flats, I am not really sure I need to do it…so think I will give it a miss…👍🏼