ZWO, the worldwide leading supplier of astrophotography equipment, announces the immediate availability of ASIAIR 1.0.8.

As a revolutionary product in DSO astrophotography, ASIAIR has been received popular recognition and highly praised by users since its release. Listening to our customer’s feedback and continuously improving the user experience is the philosophy that ZWO has always insisted on.

ASIAIR V1.0.8 comes with numerous improvements and new features as follows

• Dither
• No GPS location solution
• Support GoTo Zero Position on all mounts
• Support Takahashi Temma mount

We strongly recommend all all ASIAIR users to upgrade to this version.

1. What’s Dither

In astrophotography, to dither means to shift the pointing of the telescope slightly in random directions before take every single frame between exposures. This allows hot and cold pixels to be removed during the stacking process.

Let’s take a look at the masterpiece that “dithered” by Jerry Lodriguss.

The read noise will be obvious without dither, which lowers the image quality.

• Difference between dither and no dither

2. Dither Settings in ASIAIR

There are three settings:

Distance: defines how big to be moved with random direction on Guider in pixel unit.

Stability: defines the acceptable distance from the guiding start that to be considered as dithering end. The distance is in ArcSec.

Settle Time: defines how long to wait for guiding to be stable after dithering.

3. Dither Status in ASIAIR

Dither status in ASIAIR will be shown in the Guide Float Window and the Guiding Interface.

It shows the status of guiding and whole process of dither. After dither, it will be marked on the guide curve using the text “dither” (it will be marked with a yellow dot on the Android app)

On guiding interface, you can see the dither status as below.

Summary

Professional astronomers have a saying: “dither or die.” It may not be quite that dire for amateur astrophotography, but dithering will improve your images tremendously, increasing the all-important SNR and removing artifacts like hot pixels and satellite trails, as well as even compensating for temperature mismatches between darks and lights shot with a non-cooled COMS camera.

4. Other New Features

Manually input of GPS location

Some devices may not have GPS module, so ASIAIR could not calculate correctly. But now you can manually enter the latitude and longitude of your location.

5. GoTo Zero Position

Nowadays, all mounts that supported by ASIAIR can park Home.

6. Takahashi Temma mount support

In the next version 1.0.9, the DSLR will be supported.

Keep improving and innovating our products, providing better customer service is what we are always pursuing.)