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John Hayes: I'm pretty sure your recent Butterfly Nebula image will not be overlooked. So when you are awarded the IOTD for that one, people will logically conclude that the critical variable in whether or not an IOTD is awarded is the use of a Mac, and we will see greater adoption of the Mac platform in astro work  |
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John Hayes:Darius Mihai: I have a mouse, the issue is not with the Copy part. That's simple - Cmd + C. The issue is with the Cut command. There's no Ctrl + X alternative on mac. Instead you have to copy with Cmd + C, then Cmd + Option + V to paste. The combination is cumbersome. Macs aren't that needy with restarts, that's true. Windows is. Since windows 11 I only had 1 blue screen when a ssd died. Oh and the best part: I was able to buy a new SSD and replace it in a few hours. No need to spend hundreds of dollars and be without my laptop for 2 weeks. PCs are superior to anyone who's more hands-on with their devices. Macs are superior for people who prefer to take them to the manufacturer for any upgrade or repair However this comes at a cost, one has to not mind spending the big bucks and replace entire assemblies rather than just the malfunctioning component. Hopefully with the advancement of the Right to Repair movement, macs will start being more repairable and because of this, more green. Less thrown away devices, less pollution in the landfills. It would be a good thing because macs do have the best battery life I've ever seen. It's like magic. Some days I work for 8 hours without even realizing that the charger is not plugged in. On PCs with windows I get a low battery notification in 2-3 hours tops, unless it's my Asus VivoBook 13 slate oled which can stay on for 8 hours and more. But this is worse than a mac, all glued together and no way to upgrade anything, not even the storage I think. On my work mac, I had a cracked screen because the charger cable popped under the screen while I was closing it. My mistake. Anyway, I sent it in for repair. It took 2 weeks and they replaced the entire screen assembly, including the aluminum frame, hinges, backlight, everything. The weirdest part was that the laptop came back with a plastic film over the logo to protect it, but the screen had a few prints on it and no protective plastic film. Go figure  One thing that really bothers me in windows is that it starts auto-updating for no reason. It happened once while on the field. I wasted 30-40 minutes with their ill-timed "update". Thanks, I am hopeful that linux will be better for my needs. |
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John Hayes: That's really odd. I've had an Intel i7 fully fanned-up-non-outdoor-rated NUC running my TOA at DSW for over a year. I've power cycled it maybe 10 times in that span--most of those when I was actually on site to deal with the issues I had early on with the Moravian C5. I've had identical NUCs running my CDK and FSQ out there since I first commissioned those rigs in March. Same thing. I've never had any of them crap out during the night (that loud sound you hear is me knocking on a very large piece of wood). If one of them dies, I'll spend a thousand bucks to replace it and be back up and running in two days. At home, I run two more identical NUCs on my backyard scopes. Never an issue with them during the night--although, admittedly, I do power down those two and bring them in the house every day (and I would wager that if one of my NUCs does crap out, it will be one of the two that gets power cycled every day). In the house, I have a ThinkPad I keep by the couch that has never blue screened or locked up in the five years I've owned it--and it has been abused on planes, trains, and automobiles from California to Stockholm. I've got a 5950 rack machine in my music studio and a Threadripper in my office that Puget Systems built for me that stay up for months on end. For a couple of years, I used two of those cheap MeLE fanless mini-PCs here at home. They worked okay, but they are just underpowered. They couldn't handle things like the concurrency needs of Hocus Focus or high frame rates for planetary imaging. They still work, and I still have them as backstops should the need arise, but I've been much happier with the NUCs and the power and speed they deliver. I think you've just talked me out of ever considering those fanless PCs you use.  |
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I've used PS and Siril. DSS and APP. Now using Pixinsight on the MacBook Pro. Well worth the investment, the learning curve is easy with the plethora of YouTube tutorials. Matched with ASIAIR for acquiring its an impressive combination. |
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Timothy Martin: Tim, It’s the software. I’ve used, HP, Capachino, homebrew, and Nuvo PCs running windows on my astro-gear and they all behave the same. I started my career working on micro-computers before PCs and DOS and I started my PC journey with the very first IBM PC with 16k of ram and a 1289k floppy drive (for $6k!). Over the last 40 years, I’ve probably owned we’ll over 50 PCs running everything from DOS 1.0 and up, Windows 1.0 and up. I’ve hyper-clocked them, written gobs of code, integrated them into products and used them for all of my my scopes. I even wrote and sold PC code that was reviewed in PC magazine. And…it wasn’t until I started using a Mac that I found an operating system that was (almost) 100% stable along with hardware that virtually never fails. I can keep my scopes running with PCs but I’m way past believing that anything running on a PC is stable. If your Windows systems keep running for months at a time, that’s fantastic but in my view, that’s only happening because you are lucky; not because of the brand or type of PC that you use. Heck, sometimes even my scopes in Chile go for weeks on end without a single glitch! In the meantime, I have to reboot my Mac every 1 to 1.5 years…and it never gets turned off! John |
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God, I thought we were long past the old Mac verses Windows debate. It makes me feel sooooo nostalgic! Anyway, bottom line is, you will have more software choice with Windows but that said, there's no reason why a Mac wouldn't work on the processing side. Siril and PS is a very powerful combination. |
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John Hayes:Timothy Martin: I had to look up to verify that the first IBM PC did indeed have 16 KB of RAM. That’s less than my ZX Spectrum that used an 8 bit z-80 processor but came with 48 KB of RAM. The actual available RAM was less than that since something like 10KB was used for video memory and system variables. I have to say I seem to have largely avoided Windows crashes. My acquisition computer is a Lenovo box computer (with fan) that I bought used before the pandemic and it still runs without crashing. My processing computer is an AMD running Windows 11 and it too is quite stable. My home computer for general use and taxes and such is a Mac. It used to be that the Mac OS was a lot more stable but at least my experience with my machines is that Windows 10 and 11 has been very stable too. I have no particular loyalty to either Mac or Windows - it is just that I know things would be a lot more difficult for my Astro setup if I chose a Mac. |
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John Hayes:Timothy Martin: I was just teasing you. I get it. My experience is pretty similar to yours. My first microcomputer was a Cromemco System III. Z-80 processor, 64k RAM, and four 8" floppy drives with 241k ea. capacity, CP/M operating system. Later added a 5MB hard drive and thought it was a world beater. My roommate and I wrote a turnkey system to manage small newspapers--AR, billing, classified ad management, subscription fulfillment. We sold about 20 of those systems and it paid for my undergraduate degree. We later upgraded to a Kaypro-10. Same config except with an internal 10MB hard drive--and while it was more luggable than portable, it still weighed 50lbs less than the CSIII. I loved that little thing. I wrote my first ray tracing software on it. It took days to render a 256 x 256 pixel image, and I had to take it to the physics lab at school to hook up to one of their 11" color monitors with an RS-232 cable to even see the results. In graduate school, I borrowed $5,000 from West Texas State Bank and bought a PCs Limited 286--the very first 286 clone (PCs Limited later became Dell). That debt was crushing--it came with an interest rate of 20%. But it was essential to my career. Less than a month after I took out that loan, West Texas State Bank collapsed as part of the 80s S&L crisis. The government's Resolution Trust Corporation took over my note and sent me a letter asking me to make an offer. My dad told me to offer 10 cents on the dollar--$500 to settle the entire loan. That's about what my monthly payments were going to be. I sent them the offer and they accepted. If they hadn't, I still might be making payments on that thing! In those days, I experimented a lot with CP/M-86. That would have been a far better platform to build on than DOS. But the guys at Digital Research never answered IBM's calls, so we got Microsoft. I've used Macs and all flavors of Windows, Linux, and OS/2 (as well as a number of mainframe and mini-computer OSs). I've written code in more languages than I can name. I've built systems that are still running 30+ years on. I honestly don't mean to toot my own horn here. I just wanted to give you a small idea of my experience. I'll defer to you on all things telescopes, optics, and image processing. But I've spent a lifetime working 100-hour weeks with PCs and software. To paraphrase Paul Atreides, my hands are blue with code. I think the most stable general purpose OS I've ever used was OS/2 v1.2. My company had installations of more than 1,000 PCs running our software on that platform for several years at outfits like Harcourt-Brace-Jovanovich, RCA Astrospace, and TV Guide with zero stability issues. Once we moved to Windows, all hell broke loose. Windows has improved in the intervening 35 years, but not like it could have and should have. Frankly, I've been pleasantly surprised at how stable these NUCs have been. Perhaps one reason is that software-wise, I install as little as I possibly can on them. Just ASCOM, NINA, PHD2, and the essential drivers and support software for the rig hardware. And I disable as much garbage in the OS as possible (e.g., automatic updates, USB power management, and more). |
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Timothy Martin:John Hayes:Timothy Martin: That's an amazing experience. I've heard about FinThrive, and if I understood correctly and you developed it - wow. But what about Windows? I'm for sure not as experienced as you are, but it's quite developed, and maybe it could be better now, I don't know, but for me, it's enough. |
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Ahhh the old Mac verses Windows debate, kinda makes me feel warm and fuzzy and home sick all at the same time ;*)
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+1 for Pixinsight… for stacking this give you access to Weighted Batch Pre Processing which offers full-featured stacking capabilities and can be learned easily at default settings… as mentioned it's a one-time cost to own, not a subscription and $300 within the relative cost scale of this hobby I think is appropriate if you focus on actual day-to-day utility. Of course, projecting your future usage is guesswork at this point. If you feel you might stick with the hobby, I'd advocate going straight to PI… on the platform issue… I'm also Mac based and grudgingly adopted Windows after a full year of using a Mac only (Ipad to ASI Air's closed platform to Pixinsight on Macbook). That works REALLY well and I could have stuck with that indefinitely. However, a diehard "Mac guy" can easily minimize exposure to Windows by switching to a NUC running windows-based acquisition software, then Remote Desktop into that from your Mac. You might still occasionally throw your fists in the air when you encounter driver issues, etc, but this will allow you to run any acquisition software you want (and if it becomes important to you - move toward more open-source hardware). Finally, if you're concerned about benchmark testing, then PI on Linux is the best bet, but if your priority is a platform that you're comfortable with, then PI on an M chip Mac is very decent for most processing needs.
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PixInsight is really the answer here IMO, but an alternative for the Mac (and Windows) would be Affinity Photo, which is a one time cost of $70 US and has a six month free trial. It does everything that PS will do, plus it has some astrophotography-specific features like stacking and gradient removal. Check out James Ritson's YouTube channel for demos and tutorials. He also publishes extensive macros for astrophotography.
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+1 for Affinity Photo, it's a great photo-editing tool and can do wonders when fine-tuning your images.
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i'd also like to say that I use Siril too and have tested many stacking options and I find it the easiest and the best for me. I don't use a mac though I am a windows user. I also like the fact that Siril has some really great post-processing tools too. Check here for why you should use Siril |
