Nightcrawler Rotator & NINA

The angular position in NINA is referred to the celestial coordinates so that zero is due North and 90 is due East (if I'm not mistaken). The zero on the rotator is referenced to the physical zero point of the local encoder (or stepper position for the lower end of rotators) and I assume, never having used the NC, that you have to zero-in the two.

I believe once you have your rotator adjusted to your preferred orientation angle, you can 'zero' the angle measurement in the nitecrawler software.

I have the NC on several scopes and I would never try to have it rotate at night and (worse) doing it at night unattended is just asking for trouble, IMHO. You might get away with it for a while but sooner or later it will bite you regardless of how well set up it is.

You might wrap a cable and break something and it may result in shifting things enough that flats will no longer match exactly either due to a rotational mismatch or movement of dust particles. Further than that, in some cases rotating the camera will cause balance and/or issues with your pointing and tracking model, especially with mounts like the Planewave that are balance critical.

I leave my camera in the same orientation for many months at a time and only change it when I have a list of objects requiring a different rotation and then I do it during the day while I have the daytime real-time monitor camera looking at the camera and usually have the observatory owner helping me and watching for cable issues.

IMHO,  frequent rotation is just is not worth it and leaving it where it is despite the less than ideal framing is much safer and less trouble.

Not just a NC issue but a rotator issue of any brand.

As far as NINA goes, I just set up the  image search/framing section with the same rotation numbers that I get from a plate solve so that the planning image downloaded from STSci matches my existing camera orientation so I get the right framing and position when setting up an object. That rotation is then automatically dropped into the target which results in no movement of the rotator (since it is already there).

My .02

Jerry Gerber:
How do you know how to rotate it in the day if a given object might require a different rotation than another?  It seems like it has to be done at night when the scope has been slewed and plate solved on that object.

You should be able to use the planning part of NINA to do that but that will take some experimentation to know which direction to go and how far.

I typically limit my images to the two cardinal (90 degrees different) orientations, switching about every 6 months so that it takes two years to cycle thru the combinations (Jan-June at 0, Jan- June at 90, June-Dec at 0 and June-Dec at 90) which simplifies that a lot since it is basically just 90 degrees one way or the other and which way you rotate does not matter.

If I was going to do to a non-cardinal position, I would do that in the daytime using the native NC software instead of NINA and then confirm that at night.

I am sure the are some folks that auto rotate all the time but my experience with trying that has not been pleasant.