Newbe seaking advice on computer equipment for astro image post-processing

I tend to use refurbished laptops for sequence control and data collection.  I get these for about $200-300  - they are not powerful - nor do they need to be for capturing sequences.   I run 3 scopes in my driveway, each controlled by one of these cheapie laptops and remote-controlled from within my house.

I was a Photoshop guy when I started AP, and that app does not seem to need a lot of horsepower to run.  However, if you are going to be serious about progressing in Astrophotography I would strongly recommend going up the learning curve of Pixinsight.  This app is extremely powerful and flexible and I could not do without it these days.  There is a lot to learn but as you do, you will find your results really improving along the way.

Many of the processes and scripts in Pixinisght are built upon multiscale imaging.  These routines are extremely compute-intensive.  They do not really take advantage of the GPU and rely more on CPU cycles.   Starnet - now integrated into Pixinsight - is a real heavy hitter that takes a long time to run.  There are ways to make this process use the GPU and the speedup is significant! But this is not the default behavior of Pixinsight - I understand that this will be directly supported in future versions.   So for now - I would say the emphasis is on CPU-based resources. 

I ended up building a custom PC optimized for Pixinsight processing.   Pixinsight likes as many cores as you can get, lots of fast memory, and super-fast disk drives.   I went with an AMD Ryzen 12-core, 64GB ram, and super-fast NVMe M.2 drives.  It made a world of difference!

Finally - the biggest problem for me is that laptops never have as much screen real estate as I want and need for Pixinsight processing.  Large 4K screens with lots of screen elbow room are very handy.  Don't forget to calibrate your screen so that you see is what you get. 

I documented the computer and network system I set up for myself on my website: 

A Computer, Storage, and Networking Strategy for Astrophotography

This may not be everyone's cup of tea - but it really works well for me.   I began by using what I thought was a powerful desktop computer when I first started,  but I found it was not well optimized for Pixinsight and I had a lot of wait times for various processing steps.  The new system replaced my old desktop and I have been very happy with it.  So much so that I ended up building a new version of it but in a smaller form factor so that it was better suited to travel.  I spend certain parts of the year in another location and it is much easier to transport in the Mini-ITX scale. 

That can be seen here: 

A Smaller Footprint Image Processing Computer for Easier Transport

Whatever you decide to do, it never hurts to emphasize CPU Core, RAM, and Fast disk space for Astro Processing!

Best of Luck,

Pat

I documented the computer and network system I set up for myself on my website: 

A Computer, Storage, and Networking Strategy for Astrophotography

This may not be everyone's cup of tea - but it really works well for me.

Patrick, many thanks man, you have a great website, super informative.  This is just what I was looking for.  Not sure about the AMD Ryzen though.  In my day job I do a lot of CPU intensive computations (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and our experience has not been good with the AMD CPUs.  So I'm thinking about Intel i9 12900K (16 cores)?  Also, what did you do for GPU card and what RAM did you get?

Thanks again for your very useful web site.

Thanks again Pat.  Regarding the cooling system, did you get the liquid cooling because the Ryzen CPU runs hot, or do you recommend this for any CPU doing heavy duty astro work?
Thanks for your time, it is greatly appreciated.

I have been using a mini pc that you can buy on amazon for a couple hundred dollars.  199 to 230 give or take a buck or two. Running a 3.x cpu. Then you can connect the mini pc to your existing home network and control it using the Remote Desktop Connect. At least that is what I do and it has worked out very well for me. Everyone's circumstances is different. 

Hope by now you have come up with something that has worked for you and that you are still out there imaging.. 

Clear skies,
DJ