Exploring the Suffolk Virginia Night Sky – Astronomy, Astrophotography, Telescopes, EAA – Planets and Stars and Nebula and Galaxies – Looking, Learning, Sharing… Let's see what we can see…
Remember when getting a new PC required hours upon hours of moving data to some type of removable media and manually transferring it between the old and the new PC. Software and technology like OneDrive and DropBox make this so much easier. Documents, pictures, videos, and music can all be moved through the cloud to make setting up a new PC easy peasy lemon squeezy. One thing that does take a bit of time is re-installing all the applications.
My old PC is like 4 or 5 years old and is getting a little long in the tooth. I have had some issues with the hard drive and more recently I have been having been running out of memory. This old, inexpensive, Acer Aspire TC 885 probably has a little life left in it, but it doesn’t owe me anything. This was actually my second Acer Aspire, the first one I went to Best Buy and bought the cheapest Intel PC they had, when it bit the dust I ordered the second, most recent one, from Amazon.
I have never been a fan of spending a lot of money on a PC, you can over spend for tons of features and power which in most cases you will rarely use a even a fraction of, unless you are into gaming or doing some kind of deep data analytics or AI/ML modeling or something. I am not doing any of that. I need my day to day desktop PC to surf the Web(with countless open tabs in Chrome), do a bit of python development, play the occasional game, control my astronomy gear when observing, and most importantly to stack astronomy images – either live or post-process.
I recently picked up one of these small form factor Beelink Mini-PCs with a 4.4Ghz 10-core processor, 16 GB RAM, and a 500 GB NVMe SSD. This is essentially double (and then some) the processing and memory of my old PC. It is also an overall refresh in technology with the more modern processor, performance and efficient cores, USB3, Wifi6, and NVMe storage. I’ll probably add an additional SATA3 SSD for short-term archiving.
I have been going through the process of setting things up and make sure all the data gets transferred so I figured I would do a bit of a write up on the software I am installing on this new PC. Most of the software I am installing is used for my amateur astronomy efforts in one way or another.
The first thing I do after the initial set up of Windows is launch Microsoft Edge to install Google Chrome. Then on to installing the software I use day-to-day and for Astronomy, EAA, and Astrophotography.
Astronomy Software
KStars – https://edu.kde.org/kstars/
Free, open source, Astronomy Software and Desktop Planetarium. KStars includes Ekos astrophotography suite which I use to control my mount and cameras connected to a INDI server running on a Raspberry Pi.
DeepSkyStacker – http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/index.html
I have recently been using and learning ASTAP for stacking, but this is another stacking freeware program that I have used for a long time. I am pretty familiar with it, so it’s here if I get stuck with something in ASTAP.
Siril – https://siril.org/
An astronomical image processing tool specially tailored for noise reduction and improving the signal/noise ratio of an image from multiple captures. I have not used Siril, but this looks interesting so I plan to give it a try.
VNC (Client and Server) – https://www.realvnc.com/en/
VNC Client to connect to the Raspberry Pi Desktops, VNC Server to connect to the desktop from my iPad when doing things through Ekos where I need to be at the scope (ie polar alignment).
