2 questions

Guys,
I am getting a SPC900NC Philips, and the question is, what filters do I need too do the Planetary and maybe bright deepsky work ???

Second, I am thinking of getting a New Laptop, what things do I need or specs, should the Laptop have , too perform the work now, as well as future upgrades ???

I am not a computer Guroo, but I can learn, Slowly....... :S

Please give me your ideas here or in private e-mail...

Thankyou,
Bill

I'm not really a computer guru either, but I'll give it a try.

For filters, you'll want an IR/UV filter. Many people use
the Baader version and are happy with it. Since the
camera is a color camera, thats probably all you will need.

Laptop: Make sure its got several USB2.0 ports. And about
50 GB (preferably 100 GB) hard drive. Recording video
on planets will really eat-up the disk space. The SPC900NC
carton specifies a minimum system of 500 MHz CPU,
128 MB RAM, and 200 MB disk, and one USB port, but
I'd suggest to be far above those requiements.

If you will also use this laptop for processing planetary
images (probably true), then you'll want a fast CPU
like 2 GHz and a lot of memory like 512 MB. Try to
get something where the memory is expandable to at least
1024 MB -- you might want that later depending on
what software you get down the road. I'm running
2 GHz CPU, 1024 MB memory, and 160 GB disk and I
still could use more of everything.

Eventually you'll want to get a 500 GB to 1000 GB external
drive to store stuff on. And probably a second one
to backup the first one. The price per GB keeps droping
on these external drives, so there is no advantage to
buying a lot more than you need right now. In a year
or two you'll probably get twice as many GB for the same $.

If you've got a separate fast desktop system for image
processing, that would ease the requirements on the
laptop.