Netbooks for astronomy

[robindurant]

has anyone comments regarding the use of Netbooks such as the Acer One and the Samsung NC10 for use in astronomy in particular imaging. They are a very handy size and very long battery life, 6 hrs NC10. I know the do not have a disc drive but astro software can usually be downloaded from the net.

Robin

[M110]

I have the ASUS Eee PC 901 netbook (the original netbook!) running Ubuntu Eee linux operating system (different from the one it comes with)

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/146032

and I love it. I get 4 1/2 hours of battery life in full performance mode and its a great handy size. However, I would say that it is quite slow and probably would struggle processing images (I use my laptop for that, which even though it has similar specs (1.6 Ghz processor, 1Gb RAM) is noticably faster).

However for capturing them a netbook would perform fine.

regards,

Alex

[jarbi]

has anyone comments regarding the use of Netbooks such as the Acer One and the Samsung NC10 for use in astronomy in particular imaging. They are a very handy size and very long battery life, 6 hrs NC10. I know the do not have a disc drive but astro software can usually be downloaded from the net.

Robin

Robin,

The Acer One has a generous 120Gb harddisk running XP. I use it for astrophotography with my EQ5 synscan mount ( has 3 USB ports ). It can hold on for 5 hours with the high capacity battery, and certainly quick enough. In a normal session runs PHD guiding, EQMOD, Nebulosity, Skytools 3 in parallel without a single hickup :-).

cheers,

Janos