Adequate specs for an astrophotography laptop

[Mokusatsu (Australia)]

I have a great desktop computer. Big screens. Powerful. It'll do all my image processing etc.

So I'm wondering about what would be the minimum I should be looking for in a laptop for imaging.

I know people's setups will vary, so I'll probably get a spectrum of views, but I'm curious about what exactly people's set ups are.

In the field, how many USB ports are generally needed for the camera, autoguider, control of the scope itself? i.e. what's the minimum number of USB ports I should specify when picking out a laptop?

How much hard disk space am I likely to fill in a night of image taking? Deep sky vs planetary etc.

Is image ACQUISITION particularly resource intensive? Would an old clunker do?

I don't want to drop big bucks and then find I could have run everything on an ancient eeePC.

[Pepper (Steve)]

Please don’t use an eepc. Even for basic stuff it’s as slow as my daughters getting ready for school.
From what you describe if it’s just a acquisition machine, any mid range lappy will do. I’d be focused on usb sockets, hdd space

[mura_gadi (Steve)]

Hello,

Space, space and more space. If you're not processing on the lappy it can be next to nothing chipset wise.

You can get USB splitters, run a CAT5e cable and 3 USB ports from the 1 USB slot using a single $20 device.

Not sure if the AP'ers have tried them to see how they handle the multiple devices though.

If you plan to draw a lot of power from the laptop for other devices, spare batteries.

The resolution you take the pictures at will define the size, not the objects.

[Drac0 (Mark)]

An image acquisition laptop really doesn't need high specs at all. I use a 6 or 7 year old i7 and it is way more than needed. Any modern laptop, even the new celerons, will do the job. And if you are doing your processing on a separate pc you don't even need that much storage - as you move the exposures off for processing you can always delete the old ones if space becomes an issue.

My system:
2015/16 HP i7, 8gb RAM, 1TB SSD (upgrade from original 512gb hdd)

The system only has a single USB3 port so everything is connected through an external, self-powered USB3 hub - 2 x cameras, polemaster, mount, focuser, gps dongle & guide cam dew heater. All runs with plenty of headroom.


So don't be too concerned with the processor power, any i3 or better from the last few years will work, I would look to 8bg ram and 512gb or larger SSD/M2 storage, along with as many native USB3 ports as possible or a quality powered USB3 hub (I use a Startech 7 port 12v-48v industrial hub).


Cheers,
Mark

[johngwheeler (John)]

Something you might want to consider is a mini computer like the Intel NUC, and use another laptop, desktop or tablet to Remote Desktop into it.

I have an Intel i5 NUC (Skylake) with 256GB M2 SSD and it lives permanently on the tripod (covered with a tripod shroud). This has 4 x USB3 ports (mount control, imaging camera, guide camera, focuser), and doesn't require much power. It's only about 10x10x4cm and fits in the palm of your hand. It's small enough to mount on the scope OTA if you wanted, but I prefer to have it under cover to avoid the damp.

The advantage of the tiny computer is that you don't need to leave your laptop outside when imaging, and can control the imaging from a short distance away via an ad-hoc wifi network. e.g. in your car or tent if you are at a remote site, or from inside your house.

[AdamJL]

The only time you'd want something with a bit more grunt for an imaging laptop is if you use Stellarium. That thing runs like a lame dog on lower specc'd machines.

[Wilsil (Wilco)]

At the moment I am using a 8 year old laptop with an i5 processer (I think).
Acquisition is not processor intensive.
Minimum I would say is 8Gb RAM and USB ports depending if you have a USB hub.
I am using a PPBA which has 3 usable USB ports, but I have setup a MeLE (mini pc) which has 4 USB ports as well.

[rustigsmed (Russell)]

if you are doing planetary you want some ssd space and USB 3.0 (or another usb 3 port spare to add an external). otherwise you don't need anything powerful.

[sil (Steve)]

Eeepc no good, nor any old clunker. I’m using a Thinkpad, 2nd hand, dedicated to capture only, never had a problem, no apps other than capture software, no internet unless i connect it by cable at home. Every thing installed will use resources and slow things down regardless if its running or not. I wanted 16gb memory to avoid hitting limits. Multiple physical SSD internal, NO HDD at all. Several USB3 ports and an external highspeed large 2+TB USB3 SSD to capture to.
One internal SSD about 80GB at most, high speed and small to install OS ONLY, a separate SSD for capture/control apps ONLY. Many computers are designed to share a comms/data channel with efficient asynchronous control which so by isolating OS to one physical SSD it gets the fastest non shared pathway possible so you dont get lost packets in capture because of bottlenecks when trying to write to the device while reading, likewise a second drive for the apps isolates them too. Ideally three internal SSD would let you assign all caching/paging/temp to another separate physical device again giving most efficient performance. Laptops with lots of usb ports usually means its a built in hub which is not the cleanest comm pathway, you only need USB3 for best camera capture performance and another to write to a dedicated ultra high speed external device, Again this means unshared hardware or data /comms pathways where you can get packet loss while the underlaying OS does other stuff with them. NO Wifi and no running antivirus stuff it all slows things down. CPU speed GHz should be high, number of cores is irrelevant capturing is a single data channel using only one core by nature usually, so go for Ghz not cores, cores helps if you are running other stuff and essential there so only one can be maxed for capture. The philosophy is to reduce to the simplest tasks and here your focus should be capturing usable frames from a camera, so depending on your targets it might require high frame rate, which means its essential to keep usb channel clean of data traffic and avoid HDD which cant write fast enough the large video files, isolating OS and apps to separate drives means the OS isnt slowing down trying to read/write to the same physical device, because it will be reading and writing no matter what. I pare down parts of the OS too and block others so the OS is just fast and focused for my capture software only. I dont do anything else with the laptop, its single function focused still Win 7 so doesn’t have the newer garbage of 10 or 11. I only connect online for drivers checks and I control all protection of it doing that . So if you know what you’re doing you can use anything fast from the last decade and quality machine are out there 2nd hand cheap as most people think they need the latest gaming laptop etc.

[By.Jove (Jove)]

An Apple Studio - even running Windows in a VM. And if you want a screen and portability with plenty of battery life, the MacBook Pro with the M2 Ultra or M2 Max.

All would trump the Intel lot by a wide margin - especially when running on battery - as Apple's processors are so frugal that they don't throttle the CPU when on battery.

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Acquisition machines don’t need to be overly powerful…one of my units is an old Atom-based NUC from yesteryear running Win 10 64-bit. Has sufficient SSD and USB 3.0 ports to run everything required for image collection. It’s just not a machine I’d want to run PixInsight on…