Laptops from Home:

Two laptops were available during the course of the 2010-11 project, although it was useful to bring laptops from home so that all work was available on an observing night. Particularly useful was to have Microsoft Worldwide Telescope installed on a personal laptop connected to Eduroam wifi (although the signal is weak, an alternative like 3g mobile tethering was much more successful). This enabled real-time views of the current sky with a variety of photographic images overlayed to be available during the night.

Sony Vaio:

This is essential as it is the only laptop with the parallel interface to support the CCD camera; It has CCDOps installed to control the camera. Histograms of the photon counts can be viewed in CCDOps for on-the-fly analysis. Although certainly not rigorous, it does provide an essential tool to check for saturating pixels (something that should always be monitored for each set of observations).
The Sony Vaio is fairly slow and it is advised to keep it solely for running CCDOps and managing the captured FITS files. The files should regularly be transferred to either the Apple Mac or a personal laptop via USB stick. It is worth noting that the Vaio's USB ports are older than most modern USB sticks and is therefore most reliable with a smaller size of USB stick (A Cosair 4GB flash voyager was found to work ok, but a more ambitious 16GB stick was not recognised).

Apple Macbook

Due to restrictions on Windows wired internet connections, the Sony Vaio and other Windows PCs are not entitled to access the internet via the ethernet cable run up to the dome. The Apple Macbook, however, can access the internet. During 2010-11 alternatives were available for internet access and so the Apple laptop did not see a huge amount of use. Without this option however, it would most likely prove an invaluable tool to carry out unanticipated research of the night sky during an observation.