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Old 14-04-2017, 11:30 PM
Bargearse (Paul)
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Join Date: Feb 2017
Location: Canberra
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MacBook for Astrophotography

Hi all

I am about to start taking some images with my 8" SCT Meade, but am a little concerned my old Unibody (late 2008) MacBook may not be up to the challenge.

It currently has the following

- 4Gb RAM
- 240 Gb SSD
- 2 USB
- intel Core 2 Duo
- Graphics card NVIDIA GeForce 9400M

I was only going to use the following software

- Backyard EOS
- PHD
- Photoshop adobe

I was thinking of ramping up to 6Gb RAM as well.

Any advice would be great.

Thanks in advance

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Old 15-04-2017, 07:21 AM
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Atmos (Colin)
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Location: Melbourne
Posts: 6,980
It'll do it fine, I've done more intensive things recently with a much more badder laptop
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Old 15-04-2017, 08:03 AM
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Camelopardalis (Dunk)
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Join Date: Feb 2013
Location: Brisbane
Posts: 5,425
For imaging, I use a netbook based around an atom chip and 2GB of ram and 32GB internal flash card. Your MacBook is waaaaay more powerful
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Old 16-04-2017, 09:04 AM
04Stefan07 (Stefan)
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Melbourne
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I used to use my MacBook for astroimaging (running Windows 10 in Parallels) and it worked fine. However after a while I wanted to run everything natively and have a speced out laptop.

I ended up buying a second hand Dell Ultraportable 14" laptop (best for Astro). I got it really cheap and I speced it out.
- i5 1.7GHz
- 120GB SSD Primary and 500GB SSD Secondary for captures (SSD everything, I cannot stress this enough!!! I only use HDD's for storage and that's it)
- 8GB DDR3 RAM
- 14" 1920x1080 (excellent screen size and resolution is Full HD)
- Battery is around 25% warn but still get 3-4 hours (need to replace)
- 3x USB ports (all USB 3)

For imaging with a camera that has a high frame-rate you want a decent CPU. I have a camera that reaches 150FPS so my CPU is great for it.

Since you are using the same computer for Photoshop your graphics card will come in handy. I have a desktop PC with an RX480 8GB card and 16GB RAM.

Eventually you will want to get yourself an i5/i7 as well to future proof yourself

To end on a puzzled note, what I don't understand is some people have telescope setups that are easily worth 5-15k but they have a really old and crappy laptop that's only worth $100 with really low end specs. Always been confused about that!
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