heq5 pro mount not dithering in dec and causing walking noise

[Ajneet Singh]

my guide log: https://openphdguiding.org/logs/dl/PHD2_logs_QNEJ.zip

hello


I use a skywatcher heq5 pro (connected to Nina and phd2) for astrophotography but ever since I started dithering it keeps generating significant walking noise, for some reason the mount only dithers in one direction even though I have it set to spiral with 24 pixel of dither every frame. I have not checked the dither in one axis only button but the mount doesn’t Register the dec dithering instructions. Only the ra, I have informed this may be through dec backlash but slewing and guiding on my mount is regularly 1 arc second. Is it a setting I am missing? If so could I have guide as to how to either effectively in Nina and phd2? I use ascom pulseguiding as my setting in eqmod by the way. It should be noted that my prior Astro images, before I started dithering, had no walking noise and were much cleaner than they are today even though nowadays I use all calibration frames and integrate atLeast 2-3 times are long as opposed to before dithering where I used no calibration frames. So the problem is likely the walking noise. it should be noted i manually set it 24 pixels of dither with 10 pixels in nina and a scale factor of 2.5x in phd2 since before i had it at 10 pixels with a scale of 1x in phd2 and it created walking noise so i thought increasing dither would help but it didnt help because no matter what i do the dec axis wont reliable dither

[Bruce Waddington]

I think you've got some basic operational problems here that you'll need to sort out.  There were no dither commands issued by NINA for the entire night's guiding, so you weren't dithering at all.  Since there were no dither commands received by PHD2, that implies you have a dither-related configuration problem in NINA.  Going forward, you should also get on the current release of PHD2 (2.6.14) and start using the Calibration Assistant when you need to calibrate. 

Good luck,

Bruce

[Ajneet Singh]

Oh sorry this is my first time using google groups and I accidentally used reply to author instead of reply to all (thought it meant everyone in the group)

But I have two follow up questions

Could the lack of walking noise in my older photos be a results of smaller integration time and worse polar alignment (I only recently started using Nina to polar align)?

Secondly, what settings should I look out for in Nina since I just followed a cuiv tutorial a couple years ago for dithering and rewatched some of his other ones when trying to fix this and matched my settings to his?

Kind regards

Ajneet

[Bruce Waddington]

The combination of short exposure times and poor polar alignment could have reduced the visibility of the walking noise.  A poor polar alignment results in frame-frame drift in declination which is a crude dithering mechanism.  Both NINA and PHD2 have extensive, well-maintained User Guides - have you studied the sections in those documents to learn how to set up dithering and how it actually works?  We can't help you here with NINA setup, that's something you will have to take up on their forum.

Good luck,

Bruce