astro photography

Dave and Lion,

I understand what you guys are saying but the applications we are talking about here are probably not as optimised as they could be

I use;

ImagesPlus 2.5, forget good performance if you are stacking etc with 512Mb or less (assuming you have a decent number of frames to stack say 5 lights, 9 bias, 9 darks and 9 flats) and mosaic uses over a gig for a 5000 by 5000 images (my moon shot from the 350d ended up using about 1.4Gb)

MaximDL 4.11, again if you are stacking or mosaic generating, over a Gig is good.

Photoshop 7, I tend only to finish off images in photoshop, so less than 512Mb is fine.

You see it is horses for courses, you cannot generalise memory useage for applications of this type, each one uses memory differently and therefore requires experiance to determine the optimal amount of RAM for a specific case.

Later,

Jed.

Regardless of how great PSP is the point still stands that it is silly to buy a new computer that is already out-dated at the moment of purchase.

If anyone tries to sell you a new computer with less that 512MB they are attempting to sell you a sub-standard computer and you should tell them where to put it.

Computers go out of date quick enough as it is, if you want any new machine to last a decent while you need to make sure you buy one that is as up to date as possible when you do buy one.

I can agree with that Jed, horses for courses indeed. Personally I run registax/astrosnap on a 1Ghz pentium laptop with 394MB of RAM, because I use my webcam for imaging the file sizes tend to be quite small, so this combination works fine for me, but I'm not familiar with some of the progs you mention there.

It just bothers me when peolpe ask me what sort of PC they should buy and I hear that the sales people at some of the computer stores persuade them to purchase a monster, when all they are using it for is word processing and browsing the web. There is also a misconception that you need a monster to run any image processing progs, but for most people the images are small and they simply don't need a number cruncher.

So Darren, I guess it depends on your setup and what you want to accomplish...
Also, XP has 89 processes running in the background- and software producers seem intent on having more and more 'quick access' processes (for CD burning for example) that chew up your resources. Kill them and you'll have a faster machine!!

Dave, I agree with you but 512 is NOT a monster these days and even a gig is not really monsterous in this day and age.

Also, working with images IS more RAM consuming than wordprocessing or web browsing by a long shot so they are right to say that if you are gonna be doing a lot of work with images you should not go skimpy on the RAM.

In this day and age 2+GB RAM is a monster, 1GB is a littel above average and 512 is the bottom of the range for new machines. 5 years ago 512 was a monster but things are constantly evolving.

I can agree with that Jed, horses for courses indeed. Personally I run registax/astrosnap on a 1Ghz pentium laptop with 394MB of RAM, because I use my webcam for imaging the file sizes tend to be quite small, so this combination works fine for me, but I'm not familiar with some of the progs you mention there.

Just to clarify images sizes etc.

I use a Canon 350d (8 megapixel) for large scale bright objects, this teands to end up with a fits file of 30-50Mb each, the raws are around 6Mb.

For dim objects I am going to use a SAC10 one shot colour, this is a 3 megapixel camera so I expect to have much smaller raw frames maybe in the 2-4Mb range, this would lead to a fits file of maybe ~10Mb.

Darren,

What you want to image and what camera you will use and which software applications does have a direct impact on the spec of the machine you are planning to buy.

ImagesPlus is a application that is multi-threaded which primarily came out of Canon DSLR processing requirments. Because of the large image files, especially if you are doing mosaic images which require the mosaic and all of the source images to be open at the same time, you need alot of RAM and preferably a dual CPU.

If however you are using a small CCD imager and registax etc much less RAM and smaller CPU would be OK.

From the standpoint of a new laptop, you will end up with XP home or XP pro, both of which have a RAM footprint of ~256Mb so a 512Mb machine would be the starting point otherwise you will end up with hard paging and terrible performance unless you are only web surfing etc.

One point that is well worth making regarding Laptop sales, buy your RAM expansion after the laptop. I recently speced a low end laptop for a friend and the machine came with 256Mb, the cost of the upgrade from the point of sales for 1Gb was €600. Cruical had the same memory for £80, a significant saving.

Later,

Jed.

Jed/Bart,

I agree- 512 is not a monster, 1GB isn't either, and if it doesn't cost an arm and a leg why not? But anything over 1GB just isn't necessary IMO. -you won't notice any significant speed increase.

I'm a designer by profession and I use a wide range of graphics progs, For a long time I used a 550Mhz PIII with 196MB RAM with little difficulty- especially for web stuff, and even for 300dpi posters. This was a little slow, but manageable. These days I still use an AMD 1.8Ghz/256 for graphic work and a 3Ghz 64bit/1GB machine for very high end 3D work (with a workstation card). ach PC handles the task it was designed for well.

I even use the 550Mhz PC for graphics on occassion... with no problem. probably better off sticking win2K on the machine though.