Interesting... I think the laptop recharge would not be an issue but I use a fairly large Eliminator 1600 powerbox (Canadian tire) to power the mount. I recharge at home or by running my car. But recharging takes a really long time because its a trickle charge - less than 1A, but this would be good with a solar panel. It takes the whole day tho. I would say, you would need about 40 watts from a solar panel to recharge and lots of sun!

EDIT: you can draw power from your car long term and recharge the car fairly quickly but just got to keep an eye on your car battery level. Last time I went out and was using power from the car battery for about 6 hours and drained the battery. Fortunately the PowerBox doubles as a booster and I was able to start the car with it! I love it when a plan comes together!

My remote sites are way off the grid in Uganda, so solar is my only option. I am not able to import any lithium batteries, so I need to just have solar panels to charge everything during the day. My current solar charger is 60 watt, so that would work, but I heard that the Mac would recognize if the power was not exactly the right voltage and stop the charging. So I need to build a regulator I guess.

I like the new 2.2GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 Macbook Air with 512 Gb storage. It's real temping to press the button on this...

You really need this PowerBox that I have. Has AC, DC and USB power outlets and will charge off AC or DC, sounds perfect for your solar panel.

There’s all kinds of power conditioning and management in these devices. The only problem I’ve seen is when your power source can’t deliver the watts. Spec voltage levels are nominal and can be varied greatly. The typical AC to USB power adapter will run on any voltage from under 100 for NA to over 200 for Europe.

The problem with a laptop is that it can draw a lot of power when charging. I have to double check what the charger output is.

Sounds nice. I only have 128GB and it’s a problem to keep from maxing out on the drive. Most of my files are on a server now. I only have enough space for a couple of evenings of capture and processing.

The power adapter for the MacBook Air is 45W. It’s close, or eep the air off while charging and should be good.

I don't use StellarMate but I do use a Raspberry Pi with VNC from my iPad and it works like a charm. I bought a lightning to eth adapter to connect my iPad directly to the RPi3 via a fixed ip address.

Have a look at the /boot/config.txt on the StellarMate to change the display resolution.

I sent out for a new Macbook Pro - maxed out - but I still would like to have a more powerful INDI server controlling all my gear at the scope - in a remote off-the-grid location. I was looking at minicomputers but they seem to draw too much power. Anyone have any ideas for a low-power 4 GB Linux/Ubuntu computer that works well off a 12 volt battery for several days, has WIFI, and Ethernet?

For a "faster" unbuntu computer... I have a raspberry pi 3B+ and I 'think' it seems slightly faster than my previous 3B (I'm guessing the stellarmate is a 3B). I don't know if it really has improved Stellarmate OS performance as I didn't have an opportunity to try that OS on both hardware devices. This site suggests a slight improvement. libre.computer/2018/03/21/raspberry-pi-3...view-and-comparison/ Having said that, I find writing (36 M) images to the local Pi more reliable than writing back to host EKOS MacBook Pro.

I grabbed a new MacBook Air and last night had a great time using it to capture some deep sky data.
I had the MacBook connect through it's own KStars and just used the Stellarmate as an INDI server. This worked great, but I then wanted to try using VNC and run KStars/EKOS on the Stellarmate. That went well until I decided to try and change the display resolution. I wanted to try and use up the full native screen of the MacBook (1440 by 900) instead of the Pi only showing up as just about 1/2 that. But I goofed. The Ubuntu desktop monitor controls did not allow for any change, so I changed the text in the boot congfig.txt. That made it worse! Now the display via VNC shows less desktop space. The Stellarmate display is magnified, and cuts off. I made it worse! And now I can't remember what the normal config.txt was, so I cannot get the screen back to the way it was before, nor how to actually accomplish what I desired to do.

Can anyone share what settings in config will let my MacBook have a larger Pi desktop space when using VNC?

Ok, solved! I uncommented out the framebuffer_width and framebuffer_height properties and changed them to:
framebuffer_width=1440
framebuffer_height=900

Works great!

You have my exact same setup. When I need to go to the desktop, I use the finder for VNC - click go/connect to servers/ and type in vnc://stellarmate.local

When connected, you can put it in full screen and it should look good.