Ad Astra Observatory

I just picked up a Mac mini to use as an astronomy machine out in the observatory. Essentially, I need something that can run headless, and provide USB ports to the various gear on the mount.

This poses a problem, since the newly-purchased astronomy hub software that I’ve just bought, MaxDSLR v.4, only runs in Windows.

So I bought VMWare Fusion for the Mac, and installed the astronomy software there.

But now I am trying to VNC from a PC laptop over wireless to a Mac and into the VM running on that Mac. And it’s *slow*. So is it slow because of VNC? Because of VMWare? Because MaxDSLR is slow? Who knows?

I’m considering installing Win XP on the Mac and running everything natively. I’d prefer to keep it running Mac OSX (which I am beginning to like), but I just feel like anything I do is throwing good money after bad.

One thing that I definitely need to do is get better wireless reception in the observatory. Maybe a trip to Fry’s for a wireless repeater is required.

My friend Art has a very similar setup, and uses a Mac running VMWare at the mount to drive everything. The only difference seems to be that he’s connecting from another Mac. Argh.

It will all probably snap together suddenly at some point and just start really singing. On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine that I’ll never get it working right and the Russians will beat us to the moon in a cakewalk. sigh.