Telescope Reviews: This is the Best Laptop for the Field!!

Like tom, I have a _few_ notebooks kicking around. There's 5 on my desk right now, and another on the floor underneath it. They vary in age from less than a year old, to 7 years.

I have two sub-notebooks. The Asus EEE and the Asus R2h. R2h is a tablet form factor, 800x480 display, 768 meg ram, and an 80g drive. My EEE is the 4gig variant. I also have an older aspire 3000 (768 meg ram, AMD Sempron processor), and my primary 'workstation' is an Aspire 9420 (2 gig ram, 160g drive, Core2 Duo) with a 20 inch monitor plugged in. I've used them all with various software combinations for my astro stuff.

All of the Acer laptops suffer from horrible battery life.

The real problem I have for astro stuff with the R2h (My preferred unit for at the telescope) is twofold. Most astro oriented software just wont work well with a touchscreen and no keyboard. Some of it wont work at all on the 800x480 display. Example PHD wont fit on the 800x480 display, and there's no options to size it down a bit to fit. CdC is awkward on the touch screen, hard to do accurate 'right click' touch movements. Likewise, stellarium is also a bit awkward on the small touchscreen. Dont even bother loading MaxDSLR or the like onto a sub notebook with a tiny touchscreen and no keyboard, it's pointless. I have one of the rollup usb keyboards for this little fella, but once that's attached, it takes up as much space as a full blown notebook, so I lose the benefit of the small tablet form factor. On the plus side, this thing can dim down enough a red screen isn't really necessary, and when I let it do it's thing for power save, it'll run for a long time on a battery, but even if the battery runs down, it takes plain old 12V. I can power it from the same jumper battery that runs the scope.

I haven't tried windows on my EEE. The software I'd like to use on it, wont run on the small display if I load windows, and anything I write will end up targetted for linux or windows, so, I'll be able to run it on the EEE using the native linux. The tiny keyboard on this one is a bit of a pain at times, gotta get used to the small keys every time i start to use it again. I wish this one ran from 12V too, but, I have small inverter that can run it, and plugged in with the telescope to the jumper battery that powers the EQ6, that battery can carry them both all night with no issues. Over the last year I have been slowly writing my own software for use at the scope imaging, as time permits me to work on it. I'm being very careful to make sure the user interface is comfortable and workable on the 800x480 display of the UMPC form factor stuff I have here. When it's ready for prime time, EEE will possibly replace my current notebook used at the scope.

The Acer 9420 has more power than needed, a 17 inch display, and lots of disk space. It's a bit big for use out in the field, and as it's a primary work computer, I dont want to subject it to long evenings outside getting full of dew etc. This is a power hungry beast, another drawback for use in the field.

The Aspire 3000 has a 1280x800 display, everything runs ok on that. It came stock with a 2200mah battery, which was in pretty rough shape, only lasted about 10 minutes unplugged. Earlier this summer, before chris and I went on our 'star party vacation', I bought a new battery for it, wasn't cheap, but I bought a 4400mah battery, two of them. If I start the evening with both charged up, I get around 7 hours out of the pair. We built red screen covers by sewing rubylith with a felt back, to make a pocket that just slips over the lid, works GREAT out in the field.

For now, the 3000 has been designated my 'at the telescope' computer.

All of the older and less powerful notebooks suffer one common problem. Capturing video frames at 1280x1024 uncompressed, they cannot write the disk that fast, so trying to save avi files to the hard drive results in lots of dropped frames. My solution is pretty simple, I've got some 8 gig usb jumpsticks here, got em cheap earlier this summer. I can record directly to the jumpstick and not lose any frames, those things are speedy.

In the end, after a year of playing with various combinations, my final conclusions regarding a notebook in the field are a little different than what I originally set out thinking. First off, screen real estate is golden if you plan to use a planetarium program. Not so sure I even want to try go back to an 800x480 screen, I like Cdc on the 1280x800 when I'm at the telescope.

Power has always been an issue when we are 'out and about', and we have used all sorts of power sources to get beyond normal laptop battery life. Finally, a couple weeks ago, I broke down and invested in the ultimate power accessory for use 'in the field', a 100 foot extension cord. We have 200ah of deep cycle power in the van, with a 1000 watt inverter. We aren't going to *BLEEP* upwind on the power issue anymore, out in the field, just run the cord from the van to the telescope. We have yet to camp at a star party where we cannot reach the scopes from the van with a 100 foot cord. The deep cycle in the van can run both our laptops all night, with power to spare. For a year we've played with various battery/inverter setups, always of the mindset 'there is no place to plug in' when we are out in the field. After our trip to multiple star parties this summer, final conclusion was, there is either power already on the scope field, or, we can camp within 100 feet of where we set up, we have not seen an event where there isn't one of these two conditions. $120 put a 200 ah deep cycle in the van to replace it's tired old house battery, and a few more bucks put the 100 foot extension cord in, the inverter was installed last summer, originally intended to be used charging laptops thru the day. No more fussing with power solutions for us, the extension cord is the final answer, and laptop batteries do NOT last long enough, even the best of them, we want to be able to go for 8 to 10 hours at a stretch. When you do the final cost analysis it gets rather surprising too. 17ah jumper batteries are the 'big ones' around here, run $100+, and wont carry scope + laptop all night. 180ah deep cycle rv battery ran $120, carries two laptops all night, with power to spare. The thousand watt inverter cost a bunch, but I already had it. At canadian tire I can buy a 150w inverter for $39. That's sufficient to run one laptop and accessories. With the deep cycle mounted in the van as the house battery, charging is also trivial, by definition it arrives at the location 'fully charged', charges whle driving.

Oh, and to further aggrivate the power issues, fall is rapidly approaching, and, when we were out last weekend, dew arrived. Guess I better add another 2 amps per telescope into the power budget, dew controllers arrive next week.

Another HUGE caveat for field operations, which gave me a lot of grief. Usb ports and power. I need to plug in 2 serial usb converters (one for the mount, one for long exposure control for the Canon), then a usb cable to the camera itself for dl photos, another to the guide camera or webcam, and finally a usb port for the motofocus controller. 5 usb gadgets, two of which require FULL usb power, the webcam and the motofocus controller. Simple solution is a usb hub, but, finding a usb hub with 5 ports, that will give full power to all 5 ports is actually a bit of a trick, and ultimately it arrives with 7 ports and a 3.5 amp 5V power supply, that wants to plug into a 110V supply. Finding a suitable replacement supply that'll plug into the 12V battery running the telescope, and power that usb hub, turns out to be way more expensive than the hub was originally. I _could_ make do with a 4 port hub, but, that results in a far bigger cable mess, it's much cleaner to have one 7 port hub velcro attached to a mount leg, all the cables on the mount/scope attached in place with velcro, then run ONE cable from the hub to the laptop. Again, reference above the extension cord power solution, the little wall wart for the usb hub now has a 110V plug sitting in the power bar that's under the tripod.

When the usb issues are all fixed up, and you have everything powered, then there's yet another power issue that comes up, at least if you are using a DSLR. When it gets cold out, the battery in the DSLR lasts just over an hour, closer to 2.5 hours when it's warm. It takes anywhere from 1.5 to 2.5 hours in the wall plug to recharge. In order to be able to go continuous, one needs either a 110V adapter for the camera, or, lots of batteries. We have 3 batteries for each camera (bought no-name spares off of ebay for about 12 bucks a pair, they work great), and two chargers. The charger comes out to the scope with us. Even in the cold season, 3 batteries will allow us to image non-stop, there's always one on the camera and 2 in the recharge cycle. Now that I have capitulated on the 110V plug concept, I may look into powering the DSLR from the 110V plug too.

The point of my long power rant here, powering the notebook is just the FIRST step of an all up imaging solution in the field. There's a lot of other gadgets that ultimately need power, and, it's far more problematic to power all of those than the notebook, which was designed for portable use.

In the end, here's the final lessons (to date) from lots of experimenting with different combinations at the telescope, and in the field.

- I like having the larger screen, the sub notebook screens are tedious at the telescope.
- I can use the small chicklet undersize keyboard quite well, in daylight. I sit at telescopes in the dark, at night. Nuff said. Full size keyboard is essential.
- I can fight with, and spend lots of money on various power solutions to be truely portable. In the end, the only thing that's going to work for all night imaging sessions is a 110V plug, and, if it's coming from an inverter, a sufficiently large battery backing the inverter. Been there, done that, got that t-shirt twice over, and a brand new big battery in the camper van.