Imaging Computer Options

[Shelster1973]

Well, last night made one thing very clear to me...my 7 year old Core 2 Duo laptop, despite having had new life pumped into it with an SSD, just does not cut it when being used for imaginf, especially Plate Solving.

Have decided that I want somehting else and while I could look at getting a new laptop, have been contemplating getting an Intel NUC.

Can re-use the SSD I have i the laptop and then just need to get some memory, which will be 16GB minimum.

Does any one have any experience of using these?  Realise that I will need another screen, but plan is to do the build indoors and then when all is up and running, have a remote viewer / desktop running on it.  Have W7 Pro 64 bit on the SSD and W10.1 Pro on my desktop, so theoretically could use Windows Remote Desktop on them and am sorted.  Would go for a remote viewer so can do the focusing while outside on my tablet, but do have the Arduino 2 focuser sat built in my house, so need to get round to getting that up and running and can then integrate that with SGP and other than turing mount on and getting it initally alligned, could do most of what I have to do from the comfort of my geek room.

[MattJenko]

What kind of imaging are you doing? From your sig it appears to be DSO imaging, which is actually not that hard hitting on laptops, planetary on the other hand... What issues are you encountering? For platesolving, what are you using - PlateSolve2 fixed a lot of woes for me.

Cheers

Matt

[MattJenko]

and for blind solving I use the online astrometry.net solver, as I image from the garden with wifi, which works well as well.

[Shelster1973]

2 minutes ago, MattJenko said:

What kind of imaging are you doing? From your sig it appears to be DSO imaging, which is actually not that hard hitting on laptops, planetary on the other hand... What issues are you encountering? For platesolving, what are you using - PlateSolve2 fixed a lot of woes for me.

Cheers

Matt

Yeah, is DSO and nebs.  For platesolving was trying to use AstroTortilla as had no issues with this when using my D7100....problems have come from using a CCD now.  The image seems to take an age to actually download from the camera ( a lot longer than the 6-7 seconds it takes to download when running and image run)

1 minute ago, MattJenko said:

and for blind solving I use the online astrometry.net solver, as I image from the garden with wifi, which works well as well.

Have also looked at using the astrometry.net solver that is part of SGP, but that did not solve anything for me last night.  I did dowload the offline files so that it can attempt to solve by not uploading the image.

Think my issue with the non solve was trying to take the plate solving image with the Ha filter attached.....

Love the new learning curve that goes with the steps forward in astro-imaging...

[MattJenko]

That download time does sound a little slow. Are you using the SX with guider and everything running through the hub, so guide images etc all coming down the same usb cable? If so, you could either run them down different cables to different ports, or extend the guide sub length to alleviate any contention. I always use Lum for platesolving, made the same Ha filter mistake myself

[Shelster1973]

Have al things connected through hub.  PHD2 is set to 'On Camera' for the guiding.

Have a very limited number of USB ports on the laptop, hence the reason for running them all through the hub.

Of the three ports i have, I suppose I could re-shuffle so have guider, focuser (when I fit it), mount and mouse BT adaptor on the hub and then have the camera wired straight to the lappy.

[beamer3.6m]

I use a very old laptop for my imaging rig.

I think the power needs to in the processing but for the capture most of the time the laptop is doing very little.

I connect he mount, start BYEOS, and skytech x (which is a much less power intensive star chart software) and then plate solve.

I don't start guiding until I have plate solved and that's it.

I find the important thing was to have the guide camera in its own port and the imaging camera. All else (focuser, mount) runs through a hub.

Hope that helps.

[wuthton]

I got myself a micro-pc a while ago, can't rate it highly enough. I went with a Zotac zbox CI320 rather than a NUC because it carries 6 usb ports so I could ditch the usb hub (various types of which had caused nothing but trouble). I've mounted it on the scope and used a set of short usb leads to connect everything up. 

An added bonus has been a noticeable improvement to guiding from the reduction in cables to the floor and cable drag. 

[Shelster1973]

57 minutes ago, beamer3.6m said:

I use a very old laptop for my imaging rig.

I think the power needs to in the processing but for the capture most of the time the laptop is doing very little.

I connect he mount, start BYEOS, and skytech x (which is a much less power intensive star chart software) and then plate solve.

I don't start guiding until I have plate solved and that's it.

I find the important thing was to have the guide camera in its own port and the imaging camera. All else (focuser, mount) runs through a hub.

Hope that helps.

Many thanks...will look at how things are cabled up possibly re-jig to suit.

16 minutes ago, wuthton said:

I got myself a micro-pc a while ago, can't rate it highly enough. I went with a Zotac zbox CI320 rather than a NUC because it carries 6 usb ports so I could ditch the usb hub (various types of which had caused nothing but trouble). I've mounted it on the scope and used a set of short usb leads to connect everything up. 

An added bonus has been a noticeable improvement to guiding from the reduction in cables to the floor and cable drag. 

Like the look of that Zotac, but can't seem to find one for sale anywhere at the moment.  But did find a 7" resistive touch screen on Amazon that has a USB and HDMI interface, so can use that at the mount when setting up and pack away when all is up and running....

[wuthton]

I think it may have been superceded by the CI321 and CI323. 

[derrickf]

Zotac 1320  has been replaced by THIS available at several other suppliers too

 

HTH

Derrick

[beamer3.6m]

I think the astro programme you use is crucial.

Stellarium is a hog on the PC I find.

Try SkytechX and see if that improves things.