laptop and powersupply for astrophotography, whats the min?

You can get up transformers that will convert a 12v cigarette lighter to 240V, Lidl and Aldi have them on special from time to time. I have one that converts from 12V to 110V which is prefect to charging a laptop

Darragh

no car seanie

Then get one!

I hear that there are now car power adapters for your laptop too.

Well you can get adapters that give you a three pin plug from your cigarette lighter socket. Not the most efficient way to power things I'm sure but they are handy when you are stuck.

When I got the observatory first, I went with a similar idea of a cheapo desktop, lowish spec, but then I found that running photoshop and registax were totally out of the question as they took ages to run, so if you go down this route, be prepared to get a good usb stick and transfer all the data to the good laptop, I ended up preferring processing the data while taking another imageing run, doing both at the same time, that cant be done and a low spec machine.

My advice.
Go big & Fast.
If you get into the photography side of things its essential.
Big Screen, Big Memory, Big Storage, Fast dual Processor and get one thats totally up to date.
I arsed around buying cheepo Dells and Lidils and spent in total
enough to buy 2 high spec machines.

I'd also recommend a Toshiba. Sturdy as hell.
The Satellite is the one I use

www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Toshiba_Satellit...01D00UEN/version.asp

and it can pretty much handle anything I throw at it.
(Which thankfully is no longer the mouse as I used to do with the other pieces of crap I had)

Having said that the Dell I still have and acts as a handy backup.