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I have been using a NUC at the telescope for about 18 months now. I now have two of them, one for each rig. One is an 8th gen i5, the other a 10th gen I3, 8G of memory and a 500G M.2 drive in each. They have been reliable performers. I can't say exactly how much power they pull but on my refractor (Small heater belt) I have a 9AH 12V gel cell backing up the power supply and it will run the mount, heater, NUC and camera for maybe half an hour in the event of a power bump. It is not intended for longer term supply, just to float it over any interruptions. the NUC is not exactly a power hog but obviously uses more than a Raspberry Pi. On my SCT with a heater that runs to 2A it would not last long in an outage. I have them mounted in plastic enclosures to keep the damp off them, with USB3 extension cables ending in through-panel USB ports so I basically never need to open up the box. The NUCs are configured to boot on power being applied.
You need a router of some description to make it easy, but I remote in to mine via Teamviewer with "Exclusively accept LAN" connections enabled so they only work within my own network, and you don't need a Teamviewer account to get to them.
Later versions of the NUC are supposed to run from 12V to 19V supply but I found at least the first of mine (Which should be 12V compatible) flaky at 12V so I use 12V-19V DC-DC converters off Ebay. The input supply is 12V to simplify what I have and the NUC still runs off it's preferred voltage. At 12V it would sometimes start boot looping.
Edited to add: My experience is different to Glens, One of my rigs (The ASI294) is direct connected to the NUC via a dedicated USB3 cable, the other one (An ASI2600) on an iOptron mount is connected via a USB2 cable to the hub at the top of the mount and then to the NUC via a USB3 cable from the base of the mount. I had issues finding a USB3 cable between the mount and camera that worked reliably so I dropped that section to USB2 and it has been fine since. Even at 50 meg or so file sizes the camera download only take a couple of seconds at USB2 speeds. I have a spare USB3 port cabled to the NUC inside it's box if I ever get around to running a dedicated camera USB3 cable through the center of the mount.
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