Mini PC for Astrophotography

[russ_watters]

Hey guys - I used to be a regular here, but according to the "welcome" message at the top of my screen, I last visited 3 years and 2 months ago. I guess the main reason for that is twofold - the apparent plateau-ing of PC technology has made the hobby less interesting to me and my rising hobby of astrophotograpy has largely replaced it. Enter my current need....

I have a telescope and use a laptop for guidance, image acquisition and image processing. It is somewhat processor intensive, but not excessively so. The laptop is a 2006 Dell Inspiron with an Intel T2400 Core duo 1.83 GB with 3 GB of ram (that doesn't sound right - maybe 1GB is shared). My telescope sits on my deck most of the time, about 20 feet from my couch, so I have a 12V (13.2V) power supply, USB hub and a couple of other interface gadgets mounted on the cover of a wheel-d crate and 30' of USB cable to run it all from my couch (pic attached).

I would like to replace as much of that junk on the crate as I can, with a mini PC. It would deal with the following problems/make the following improvements:

1. Make the setup a lot cleaner.
2. Wifi interface with my laptop.
3. More hard drive space/faster.
4. My cameras sometimes interfere with each other. AFAIK, a PC uses multiple hubs so the overall bandwidth would be better.
5. Power issue: The primary camera is peltier cooled (~60W), the scope has a dew heater (~20W) and the scope itself uses ~15W. It would be great if I could power all of this from a custom (I'd make it) front faceplate on the PC. That would make the setup A LOT cleaner.
6. If it's faster, my processing would be faster. The way pictures of planets are taken, I capture several thousand frames at 30 fps for each color, then use special software to stack the images overtop of each other, which cancels-out atmospheric distortion by averaging the various frames. As you can imagine, stacking 3,000 uncompressed frames from a multi-gigabyte AVI is hard drive and processor intensive. It takes about 10 minutes for each processing run of each color and I might shoot half a dozen sets of 3 colors (18 avis at 3 gig) in a night.

I don't want anything crazy: I do occasionally take this rig on the road and will need to be able to power it from my car with an inverter when I do (though when I do that, I'd power the 12V stuff directly from the car instead of through the PC. I don't know what my budget is, but I could probably be talked into $750 (including OS) if I see a good reason for it. Otherwise, I'm thinking I should be able to make this happen for a lot less than that. Newegg has a number of mini PCs including Shuttles and ASRocks, etc.: http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCateg...rebone-Systems
Prices vary widely. Getting a decent power supply will require an upper-level mini PC, but I don't need sound and I don't need much of a video card: this will be headless. I'm not sure I even need a CD - I would think I can do a USB cd dive or temporary one hanging off the side to install the OS. I know nothing whatsoever about the mobile/low power processors now on the market, but I'm hoping there isn't anything lower than what my laptop has....

So -- recommendations?

[edit: sig is out of date]

[RealBeast]

Hey Russ, nice looking telescope. I have a Meade LX200 12" and have been thinking about getting a camera -- yup still use my eye and have a bunch of eyepieces. How do you like that Meade Deep-Sky Imager II Pro?

I've been looking at an ASUS P7H55-M and i5Core in a nice small black case with a wireless N connection to my home network. I've built a bunch of Shuttle rigs in the past and found the size nice, but the options are too limited.