Laptop recommendations for solar/planetary imaging

Hello Danny,

I have recently been dealing with the exact same situation and was given great advice by Martin Wise on Cloudy Nights and from his videos (under the name Wise Imaging) on YouTube. I will try to construct a worth summary here, but you may want to check in with the master himself.

1. Most laptops built within the last few years have CPU's, GPU's, RAM and SSD's capable of supporting the frame rates you need. What often is lacking, especially on lower end laptops, is adequate bus speed of the motherboard. Without a high enough bus speed, this becomes the bottleneck and nothing else is then able to operate at full capacity. Look for the highest bus speed you can.

2. Consider an external SSD and an internal one. I have regularly filled the internal one and need to switch to external storage if I want to continue imaging. Nowadays, I just use the external and switch to internal if I fill up the external one. This of course does require at least two USB-3 capable ports; one for the camera and one for the external SSD.

3. Adequate cooling - many laptops will throttle down the voltage if the CPU gets too hot because they don't have great internal cooling or big fans to blow away all that hot air. When the voltage throttles down, the processor speed goes down, too. I was considering a gaming laptop for its better cooling (gamers want high FPS, too) but was told this wasn't necessary. Just look for something that has enough cooling ability (active or passive) to prevent thermal throttling.

4. USB traffic - this is actually more related to your camera settings in your capture software. Make sure to adjust USB traffic to get the highest frame rate without dropping frames. When I adjusted mine properly, I DOUBLED the frame rate I was getting.

5. Camera type - while both solar and planetary can be done with the same camera (I use a mono 178 IMX camera), hydrogen-alpha solar and planetary can actually benefit from different pixel sizes. Many solar images use a 174-based camera because at the wavelength of hydrogen-alpha light you can critically sample the image with a larger pixel size, and larger, fewer pixels covering the same area will download faster allowing for even higher frame rates. Meanwhile, planetary imaging benefits from much smaller pixels, especially since the ROI is usually so much smaller that you are not trying to download huge numbers of pixels with every frame.

Hope this helps,

Arnie

Thanks very much for the detailed response Arnie. 

1) I've been looking today and have been struggling to determine the bus speeds of specific laptops. Generally its not something advertised as part of the specification and in most cases vendors don't even identify the motherboard make/model. Have you had any experience of this, any resources that might help with that? Generally speaking it seems bus speeds should be in line with the other components, a higher spec should in theory mean higher bus speeds to support. It would be nice to have a way of finding that info though. 

2-4) Two or more USB-3 ports seems sensible and I'll keep cooling in mind, thanks for the tip.

5) That's interesting and not something I've heard before. I'll be using an IMX 178MM too initially as that looked to me, to be the best sampling fit for a 50mm, 350mm fl @ f7 scope. I'll admit, I did wonder why many are using a 174 with similar scopes as on paper the pixel size doesn't seem like the most ideal fit.