The best imagers I know tell me they used to spend about 2 hours capturing 'data'. The advantage to it is that I don't have to drag a laptop along with me or worry about how I'll power the laptop or how many hours the laptop can run. I have a self-contained guider called an LVI SmartGuider 2. This pretty much guarantees that none of your noise in one frame will align with noise in any other frame.
#Backyardeos dither software#
but that's not a problem because image integration software will use star positions to "register" (align) the images for stacking. What you end up with are lots of images which no longer stack on each other precisely. and this continues all night until the image acquisition plan is completed. At the end of that frame, it tells PHD2 that it's ready for the next nudge. BYE then opens the camera shutter of the next frame. Once the move is completed and the mount has had a moment to settle, it replies to BYE that it's ready for the next shot. enough to move just a few pixels - there is a check-box to tell it to nudge in RA only if you want, but normally it'll nudge in both RA & Dec). PHD2 then nudges the mount in some random direction (usually just a very tiny amount. it tells PHD2 that the shutter is now closed. But rather than immediately opening the shutter for the next shot, instead. and then closes the shutter at the end of the exposure. BYE will open the camera shutter for whatever length of time you've programmed. scope aligned, PHD2 calibrated and following a guide-star) and start your image acquisition run in Backyard EOS (BYE). What will happen once you've got everything running (e.g. suppose you use Backyard EOS and enable Dithering. PHD2 sets up a listening port to "talk" to your acquisition software. But things like Nebulosity (also made by Stark-Labs who make PHD so there's no surprise there) and Backyard EOS (& I presume Backyard NIK) support it. It requires that your image-acquisition software also support it. OK, have no idea about doing that, so got any links to doing dithering ?