David,

I don't have the reference at my fingertips but it's pretty easy to set up the Pi to boot StellarMate from an external USB. This has several advantages. A USB 3.0 SSD is much faster than a microSD card, you can have all the space you want to store images (which also happens pretty fast), and you can remove it and plug it straight into your processing computer instead of having to drag files across the network.

In fact I often just leave the files in place and process them right there on the SSD -- it's that fast. The only challenge is finding a way to mount the ext4 file system. On my Mac it was pretty easy, I'm still struggling to do it for Windows. It's also a pretty inexpensive way to go, you can get a terabyte drive for around a hundred bucks.

OK, one other challenge: Sometimes I disconnect the SSD and then forget where I put it. Or forget to plug it into the Pi and wonder why I can't connect to it (answer: its boot drive is missing, you numbskull Rick!). My SSD is maybe half a centimeter thick and considerably smaller than the Pi -- a little tab of Velcro holds it nicely to the case. I got one with a USB-C connector so it would plug right into the MacBook Pro where I do all my processing, so I have a USB-C --> USB-A adapter on the Pi.

As for connection method reliability, I guess I have to agree that I have seen both Wifi and cabled connections to a laptop die more often than sequencing does on the Pi, and the latter is most often a guiding or focusing fail which is independent of how you connect. Usually if a cabled connection fails it's because the astronomer is clumsy, but "I resolve to be more careful around wires in the dark at 2 AM" is not exactly a robustly-engineered solution. Aviation taught me that human factors should be accommodated where possible, not treated as character flaws to be overcome.

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