Sunday, November 25, 2012
Those Crazy Computers! Part I: Choosing an Astro-puter
Happy Thanksgiving, y'all! Hope you and yours had a great one full of turkey, football, Black Friday madness, and whatever else floats your boat. Me and Miss D? We did did a change-up this time. We've spent many a wonderful Tnxgiving at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans, but decided it was time for something new for 2012. Long and short? Unk had his Thanksgiving dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings. You'll hear all about that week after next. For now, it's them crazy and sometimes maddening computers...
Crazy Computers? Yeah, you know, “astro-puters,” computers used in amateur astronomy. Unk was a young man during the microcomputer revolution, and is more than old enough to remember a time before everybody had a PC on their observing table. I will admit small computers have improved amateur astronomy immeasurably, but that don’t mean I always like ‘em, muchachos.
Crazy Computers? Yeah, you know, “astro-puters,” computers used in amateur astronomy. Unk was a young man during the microcomputer revolution, and is more than old enough to remember a time before everybody had a PC on their observing table. I will admit small computers have improved amateur astronomy immeasurably, but that don’t mean I always like ‘em, muchachos.
Despite the
fact that computers (specifically Unix computers) are a big part of Unk’s day
job with the U.S. Navy, don’t get the idea he necessarily gets along with ‘em all
the time. As his colleagues will attest, it is not at all unusual for Unk to
start saying real bad words in the direction of a formerly friendly Sun
Workstation.
I suspect most of you are about the same. And not just those
of y’all with a few gray hairs. Unix and Linux and even Windows and OSX can be
confusing for anybody, even when all you want to do is write an email to your Aunt
Lulu, and downright infuriating when you are trying to use the dang things to
send your telescope on go-tos. So, this morning let’s talk about how to
navigate the rocks and shoals of computerized amateur astronomy.
If you’re
gonna have a computer at the telescope, you gotta have a computer, right? It’ll
probably be a laptop or laptop-like machine since you’ll want to run it on
battery power, but that still leaves a lot of choices. Operating system? Traditional
laptop or a netbook or ultrabook? How about a tablet? How big a screen? How big
a hard drive, if any? How you gonna power the dadgum thing into the wee hours? What
kinda software you gonna run on it? We will answer at least the first couple of
these questions, “Which operating system?” and “Which computer?” right now,
friends.
The starkest
choice before you is “Windows or Apple?” There are other OSes, including the
aforementioned Linux (like Unix), but astro-ware is pretty paltry once you
stray from the big two, so even if you still love and use CP/M for all your
other computing needs, you will likely want Windows 7 or Apple’s OSX on the telescope
field.
Hokay, which
then? I used to be very hesitant about recommending a Macintosh for use with a scope.
Not because the Apple’s performance or reliability wasn’t what it oughta be, but
because of the lack of astronomy software for the Mac. There were a couple of
planetarium programs, mainly Voyager
and TheSky, and there was a planning
program, Astroplanner, and that was
about it. Oh, there was also a CCD/imaging program or three, but imaging is not
our subject this time. All we want today is a computer that will send the go-to
scope to sky objects.
There didn’t
used to be much astro-ware for Mac.
That’s changed. Over the last couple of years, the Macintosh has made
tremendous strides in astronomy and everything else. The first breakthrough was
when Apple changed from the Power PC processor to good old Intel chips, just
like in PCs. That meant it was a much simpler proposition to run Windows
programs on a Macintosh if necessary.
The biggest
change has been in the number of Apples sold over the last decade. Lots of folks
are turning to The Other Guys these days, maybe because they’ve got comfortable
with Apple after using iPhones and iPods and iPads. There is now a big enough
user base to impel developers to write more astronomy software for the Apple
Corps.
Almost all (but
not all) major astronomy programs are now available in Mac flavor: Cartes du Ciel, Stellarium, TheSky, Starry Night, not to mention that huge
iOS hit SkySafari, which has been
ported to the Macintosh. This is not only good in that it gives Apple troops a
wider choice, but because it makes the transition from Windows to Mac a lot
easier for former Win users. You can boot up friendly CdC or Stellarium on your new toy, and, despite
a few changes to embrace, begin using your software productively from the
get-go.
Despite the
pluses of the Mac, there’s little doubt most of us will still choose a Windows
machine. Not only because the number of astro-softs available for Win is still
by far larger, but because some of y’all are, like your old Uncle, cheap. Yes, comparably equipped Macintoshes
and PCs cost about the same, but you can find perfectly useable Windows
computers for as little as three hundred dollars, a lot less than what you will
shell out for any Mac.
So, you’ll
probably get a Windows machine. Which Windows O/S version will you run on it?
You’ll probably run Windows 7. Windows 8
is out, but not too many folks are that impressed, and most of us probably
won’t try it until we buy a new machine with 8 installed. Yes, some of the
worthies down to the club will advise you to get a copy of Win XP and get rid
of 7, but there’s no reason to do that anymore. The only point of using the older
O/S in preference to 7 or its predecessor, Vista, used to be that there were problems running older applications
under the new OSes.
It was
usually not that (fairly recent) software wouldn’t run on Vista and after—I
only found one program, Starry Night Pro
Plus, that absolutely wouldn’t boot up on Vista (it runs fine on Win 7)—it
was drivers. Lots of drivers for
various gear had a real hard time with the 64 bit versions of Vista and Win 7,
especially. In other words, most of the problems came when you tried to hook up
a CCD camera.
Today, the
driver conundrum is over, and even when it wasn’t, what we’re trying to do this
Sunday, just hook a telescope to the PC and send it to objects, mostly worked fine.
Windows 8? Who knows what that will bring, but your (up-to-date) planetarium
program will probably work fine with it.
“Up-to-date”
is the key to avoiding a lot of grief when changing OSes. Download fixes/updates as your publisher issues them, and always at least
consider upgrades to newer editions of the program you’re trying to run, even
if you have to shell out some $$$ to do so. A recent version will almost always
have a better chance of working under a new operating system than a program
that was last updated during the time of Windows fracking 98.
Once you
have decided on the operating system of choice that still leaves a huge
decision. What sort of Win PC or Mac?
The choices are fairly simple with Macintosh. You can get a MacBook Pro, which
is a standard sort of laptop with a hard drive, a nice big screen, and other hardware
features like you’ll find in Windows laptops. OR you can get a MacBook Air.
The Air is
much like the new Windows ultrabooks. It is a very thin and light computer with
a screen smaller than that of the Pro and a flash (solid state) disk drive
rather than a hard disk. It is really that last that is the sticking point. Do
you want and can you live with a solid state drive or not?
The top Air
has 256 GB of solid state disk drive (SSDD). The SSDD is good in that it is
fast and uses less power than a hard disk drive. It’s bad in that 256 GB ain’t a
lot these days. It will probably be
enough for astronomy use, but many folks who pay this much for a computer,
about 1600 dollars for a top o’ the line Air, want to use it for all their
needs. If you’re one of those people, make sure 256 GB is enough space.
In addition
to the Air itself, you’ll also need to purchase an external DVD player, since
one is not included. If you don’t want to play DVDs or load up software from
CDs and DVDs, you could do without one, I guess, but do yourself a favor and
get the outboard DVD. A DVD drive may also
come in handy as a place to stash files if the SSDD begins to get cramped.
All told,
you will be paying almost four times what Unk paid for his astro-netbook, which
has a smaller screen, but has a 256 GB hard (disk) drive. But there is no question
the Air is a pretty little thing with a screen large enough to be useful, good
battery life for astronomy—as much as seven hours—a speedy processor, and
plenty of memory (4gb) for the top Air.
The more
normal Mac laptop, the Pro? It’s even higher in price, in the range of the top Win machines. The one I’d choose for
astronomy, the mid-range Pro model with a 15.4-inch display and a 500 GB drive,
will set you back 1800 simoleons. The most expensive Pro, which sports a
17-inch monitor and a 750gb hard drive? 2500, give or take. Battery life is
good on the 15-incher, up to seven hours.
All the Pros
are gorgeous and perform very well. B-U-T… At those prices I begin to get nervous
about throwing a computer in the back of the truck for a run to Chiefland where
I’ll subject it to nightly dew baths on the Billy Dodd Memorial Observing Field.
Still, yeah, gorgeous, stylish,
computer astronomy with élan.
Choices in
Win-land are more complicated in that you have oodles of manufacturers and three
types of astronomy-suitable machines to choose among. In addition to laptops
and the Air-like Windows ultrabooks, there are still plenty of netbooks around.
PC pundits and city-slickers keep pronouncing the humble Win 7 netbook dead,
but people keep buying them in more numbers than they do the way more trendy
tablets—though that seems to be changing, even down here in The Swamp.
What the
heck is a netbook? They started out
as small laptops, usually with small amounts of solid state memory instead of
hard disks, no DVD drives, small screens, a little RAM memory, and slow
processors. They were mainly intended, as their name suggests, for browsing the
‘net and emailing and not much else. Twarn’t long, however, before their
manufacturers began competing fiercely with each other and upgrading their
netbooks to get a leg up, adding more memory, faster 1ghz range processors, and
hard drives in the 250 GB range.
I scoffed at
netbooks for astronomy when I first saw ‘em. That tiny screen? How in the hell
was I gonna do anything with the
computer out in the dark if I had to squint at the (typical) 10.1-inch postage
stamp size display? And that pokey processor? And no DVD drive. Huh!
But then my
much-loved (and powerful) Toshiba Satellite laptop died. I needed a new
computer immediately; I had a Chiefland Astronomy Village expedition in the offing. Another Toshiba? Jump ship to Apple? Something else? What if I at
least looked at netbooks? The prices
sure were right, and one might do till I could figure out what kind of REAL
laptop to get.
To make a
long story short, I wound up with a cute little red Asus. It, an external DVD
drive, and a case set me back all of 500 bucks (and you can do way better than
that today). The screen? I found out it was reasonably
useable. I’d had to wear reading glasses to decipher the Toshiba’s, too; so
what if I had to go up one magnification factor for the Asus?
One thing
that had worried me? Screen resolution. As delivered, the resolution on most of
netbooks tops out at 1024x600, which means the windows some programs display
may be cut off at the bottom. Thankfully, I found most of these machines can be
kicked up one notch in resolution, sometimes with a utility program, or, as in
my case, sometimes by changing a line or two of code in the Registry. At the
higher resolution setting, circles on my Asus’ screen are somewhat egg-shaped,
but that ain’t no big deal. No windows or buttons get lopped off.
How about
the processor? The Pine Trail CPU ain’t no speed demon, but most astroware
don’t need a speed demon. I have not
yet found a planetarium that will not run well enough, including that trio of
purty ones, Starry Night Pro Plus, Stellarium, and TheSky (6). It’s not the subject for this time, but I have also
been able to run imaging software like Nebulosity
entirely satisfactorily.
The biggest
draw of a Netbook for me? Battery life. I was oh-so-tired of powering my
Satellite with a trolling motor (marine) battery. The Toshiba’s internal
battery MIGHT get me an hour and a half (the Satellite was made just before the
advent of “mobile” processors). Miss Dorothy and I checked the specs of every
netbook in BestBuy, and found one that claimed to achieve 11-hours of battery
life. It may not go quite that long,
but I have never exhausted the Asus’ battery over the course of an “all-nighter”
(though I gotta admit that at my age “all nighter” is “till 3 a.m. if’n I
can make it”).
The Asus worked
fairly well for me for a couple of years, but there was no denying the screen was
a little small and low in resolution and the processor was a little on the poky
side. It’s now possible to improve on that without going to the size of a standard
laptop. Ultrabooks are similar to Apple’s Air: thin, light computers
with solid state drives and larger-than-netbook (but smaller than laptop)
displays.
Is an
ultrabook right for your observing table? I dunno. One might be. There are some
models, whose specs are comparable to the eminently useable Air. Some ultras
now come with 14-inch class displays and 256 GB SSDDs for prices around 1500
dollars. I’ve not yet seen a Win Ultrabook with a 15-inch screen like the one
on the Apple, though. And par for the ultrabook course at the moment is a
13.3-inch display, a 1.7 GHz processor, and 128 GB of solid state drive. These
are yours for from a number of brands including Asus and Samsung for as little
at 800 greenbacks.
How well will
they work for astronomy? Their processors are good enough, no doubt about that.
Battery life? 6 – 9 hours, which should be fine for just about any run. Couple
of USB ports, sometimes even one USB 3.0. Every ultrabook display I’ve seen has
resolution high enough that there are no worries in that regard. Finally, most
weigh in at 2 – 3 pounds so they are a joy to tote around. The single caveat?
That solid state drive.
Most
Win ultrabooks still max out at 128 GB. Is that enough? For astronomy?
Probably. Hell, my wonderful Toshiba, which I used up until two years ago, had
an 80gb drive. If all you do is load up with astroware, maybe a couple of
planetariums, planner, perhaps an imaging soft or two, and otherwise use the
computer for a little word processing and net-surfing/emailing, you will be OK.
When might you not be OK? If you have
a large chip CCD camera and are saving many images, or you have a
high-speed/large chip planetary cam and are producing big .avi files.
Even if you
are doing mucho imaging and saving large files, an ultrabook with a 128 SSDD might serve. As with the Air, you will
need to buy a USB DVD drive for the thing so you can load up software that’s on
discs, and that would make it possible to burn image files to a DVD as you go
along, freeing up the SSDD. Bit of a pain, but workable, I reckon.
My gut
feeling about ultrabooks? WAIT. I
expect prices to fall and drive sizes to go up. No, I don’t think they will soon
be as inexpensive as netbooks, which are now down in the sub-300 buck
territory, but cheaper than they are
now, anyway. I also expect most to soon sport 256 GB drives, and at least some
to get 14 – 15-inch displays. I don’t think this will take long, and that is a
good thing. Given their good battery life, processor power, and larger than
netbook displays, I believe ultrabooks will soon be the astro-puter of choice.
Plus, they are pretty; some of ‘em
are damned near as pretty as a Macbook Air.
Now we come
to the traditional astro-puter, the Windows laptop. No real surprises here.
They are pretty much like they have been over the last five years: 15 – 17-inch
screens, “normal” hard drives, built in DVDs, decent keyboards, couple of USB
ports. The change is that you get more of everything for your money now.
Even
bypassing the lowest of the low HPs (shudder), you can get an amazingly powerful
lappy for few dollars. Like a Toshiba 15-incher with a 500gb hard drive, 4gb of
memory, and a 2.3ghz processor for—get this—three-hundred-odd freaking George
Washingtons. What’s not to like? Not much. The battery life is a little shorter
than that of the ultrabooks at around 5 and-a-half hours, but if you need
longer than that a jumpstart battery and a small inverter will run a machine in
this class for as long as you’ll want to go (remember, if it's cold at the observing site your battery life will be about halved).
All in all,
it’s hard not to say a Windows laptop in this size/price range is the perfect astro-puter.
For the less high tech among us—like your old Uncle—anyways. Yes, I loved my
Asus netbook, but when I ran across a Toshiba with a 17.3-inch screen for less
than 350 clams, I jumped.
Of course,
there is always that elusive More Better Gooder when it comes to computers, and
there always has been. Some folks will tell you all of these machines, even the
Macs, are yesterday’s news and need
to be put out on the curb like yesterday’s
papers. What you want is a tablet. An iPad or one of them Android
thingies.
Do you? Maybe. iPad versus Android is kinda
like a replay of the Windows – Mac battles, and it is far from clear which is
“better” or which will be better in the long run, anyhow. One thing to
consider before choosing either is that both the iOS operating system and
Android O/S are still fairly new and not compatible with anything. Capable software, especially capable astronomy software,
is just now beginning to appear.
What astro-ware
is there? Most of all, there is SkySafari. There are a few other decent softs
for iOS and ‘Droid, but SkySafari Pro
is the first planetarium for the tablets comparable to what you can get
for a PC or Macintosh, sporting 15-million stars and 740,000 deep sky objects.
Go-to? For the Apple iOS version it is easy and proven, via either a wi-fi or
wired setup. Android? Some ‘Droid
phones and tablets can manage wi-fi control of a scope, some can’t.
Would I
choose a tablet as my astro-puter? I probably wouldn’t, not yet. I want a
couple of apps that either haven’t appeared for ‘em yet, or are just appearing.
I need a good planner, and I need a DSLR/CCD imaging program. On the other
hand, if all I was interested in was a planetarium for sending my scope on
go-tos, I could do very well with an iPad. Believe me, SkySafari running on the latest ‘Pads, even the new Mini, is sweet,
real sweet, even sweeter than it is on my iPhone. The iPad is fast and responsive
for astronomy and has an incredibly beautiful display.
Caveats?
While you should be able to get as much as 10 hours of battery life with the
iPad, that and the screen’s performance will be degraded if the iPad is used in
temperatures approaching freezing, something the Yanks among us are likely to
do. You also have to get used to the
thing. You may find the paradigm of holding a tablet and swiping a screen
perfectly to your liking. Or you may not.
You can get keyboards that work with the iPad and holders that prop it up like
a laptop screen…but if you are gonna do that, why not just get a laptop in the
first place?
How about an
Android? The main inducement for buying one instead of an iPad is price. Most of ‘em are “almost as good”
at anything as the iPad, but not quite
as good. The main problem, however, is that not all Androids are created equal.
As above, some can, for example, set up a wi-fi network to enable you to send
your scope on go-tos, but some cannot. Like PCs, they are made in a wide variety
of models from a wide variety of manufacturers. SkySafari Pro is now available for Android, and on the right
Android machine, is very nice. But it has to be the right Android tablet. Apple is still the safest bet.
So, you’ve
got a shiny new astro-puter set up next to your shiny new Meade LX80 (or
whatever). What now? How do you get the cotton picking things talking together,
much less working together? That,
muchachos, is the subject of Part II,
which I hope to present to you Real Soon Now.
Next Time:
Unk's Messier Album III
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Uncle Rod, I disagree on your analysis of Linux. If you are trying to get the most bang out of your buck, Linux is a great choice.
Right now Best Buy and the other Office Stores are offering $300 laptops for sale. Most of these are running low end AMD or Intel Celeron chips. When you get it home you will find they run like crap.
More specifically Windows is a resource hog. These laptops don't have enough RAM and the CPU are too slow for Windows. What ends up happening when a computer doesn't have enough RAM, is that it writes the info in the least used areas of RAM out to the disk drive. Unfortunatly, disk access is like 1 million times slower thaen RAM. And with the amount of RAM available on these computers it has to write it out and then read it back in continually, bringing the computer to a virtual stop.
But if you took this same laptop, blew Windows away and installed one of the popular Linux Distributions you would find that the performance was more then adequate. I am going to recommend Linux Mint running the Mate Desktop. It's not a fancy desktop, similar in fuctionality to XP then to Windows 7. But it is very usable. It will come with the LibreOffice, a nearly feature identical replacement for Microsoft Office and with Firefox Browser and Thunderbird E-Mail client.
Now for Astro Software, there are several good Planeterium Programs to choose from. Specifically, SkyChart (Cartes Du Ciel), Xephem, Stellarium and KStars. For running Astro-Planning programs the choices are much slimmer, they are virtually non existent. But most Windows apps will run under Linux using the Wine Windows Emulator. The app will be slower to start then Windows, but once running will run faster then if it were still running Windows OS using these cheap laptops.
Unfortunately I haven't tested any of these apps. I took a different route and wrote my own. Basically I load my list from a Excel Spreadsheet into a MySQL Database and from there my app can use it. And even better my app talks to SkyChart, so I choose the object on my program, click on a button and SkyChart displays it. I don't normally use a laptop to control a telescope, but SkyChart is supposed to have that functionality. But again, I haven't tested it. My personal feeling is staring into a laptop sceen (even with a red filter on it) impairs night vision and therefore I prefer to work from a report.
Right now Best Buy and the other Office Stores are offering $300 laptops for sale. Most of these are running low end AMD or Intel Celeron chips. When you get it home you will find they run like crap.
More specifically Windows is a resource hog. These laptops don't have enough RAM and the CPU are too slow for Windows. What ends up happening when a computer doesn't have enough RAM, is that it writes the info in the least used areas of RAM out to the disk drive. Unfortunatly, disk access is like 1 million times slower thaen RAM. And with the amount of RAM available on these computers it has to write it out and then read it back in continually, bringing the computer to a virtual stop.
But if you took this same laptop, blew Windows away and installed one of the popular Linux Distributions you would find that the performance was more then adequate. I am going to recommend Linux Mint running the Mate Desktop. It's not a fancy desktop, similar in fuctionality to XP then to Windows 7. But it is very usable. It will come with the LibreOffice, a nearly feature identical replacement for Microsoft Office and with Firefox Browser and Thunderbird E-Mail client.
Now for Astro Software, there are several good Planeterium Programs to choose from. Specifically, SkyChart (Cartes Du Ciel), Xephem, Stellarium and KStars. For running Astro-Planning programs the choices are much slimmer, they are virtually non existent. But most Windows apps will run under Linux using the Wine Windows Emulator. The app will be slower to start then Windows, but once running will run faster then if it were still running Windows OS using these cheap laptops.
Unfortunately I haven't tested any of these apps. I took a different route and wrote my own. Basically I load my list from a Excel Spreadsheet into a MySQL Database and from there my app can use it. And even better my app talks to SkyChart, so I choose the object on my program, click on a button and SkyChart displays it. I don't normally use a laptop to control a telescope, but SkyChart is supposed to have that functionality. But again, I haven't tested it. My personal feeling is staring into a laptop sceen (even with a red filter on it) impairs night vision and therefore I prefer to work from a report.
Linux is a great operating system...but. The problem is the software. Yes, there are applications that, for example are "almost" as good as TheSky X or SkyTools 3--or Microsoft Word. I want my choice of the best astro-ware out there, though, and that means OSX or Windows. Windows 7 works terrifically well for me. My cheap laptop runs Starry Night Pro Plus like a dadgum speed demon. Yes, you could use emulators, but why bother if all you want to run is Windows software? I salute you for taking the Linux path, but it is NOT for most of us. ;-)
There are two main subgroups of amatuer astronomers. Those who have money and those who don't. I am one of those who don't. So, I prefer to spend what discretionary money I have on telescopes and eyepieces then on computers and software. I spend about $500 on my computers and then I get a lot of use out of them, often using them for 5 years or more. I wouldn't sell LibreOffice short, it is very very good. I also have multiple good choices for e-mail clients and Web Browsers. If you haven't used a Linux Computer recently, you would be surprised at how good they have become.
Terry
Terry
I used Linux for a while, but eventually decided there was no reason to continue with it. The software is just not there. :-(
In fact, let me add that I think we should be looking beyond even Windows and OSX now to Android and iOS and similar operating systems, which is what most people will be using at the telescope in five years. Yep. You heard it here first, campers. LOL.
I have an Acer Timeline 4810T which I bought a couple of years ago. It's not the most powerful laptop out there by a long way but it it's light, thin, HAS a DVD built in but will run for about 10 hours on the battery. Buy a spare battery and you can run for a whole day literally.
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