I’m not particularly qualified to comment on the science or technical aspect of the original post but I would say that for some the size of image files could be a factor. Personally, I don’t take a lot of RAW images as a lot of my photography is of meteors, noctilucent clouds and night sky time lapses. As such, memory space is very much a concern. For example, I’ve taken well over 30,000 images since July.
Ah, but you are not doing high accuracy photometry with your images.
External USB 8TB drives appear to be £250-300 these days. You don’t say how big your images are but 100MB each is a generous estimate as far as I can tell. That could get quite expensive if you need to buy three disks per annum, enough to hold 240K or so images.
My images are rather smaller, in the range 2-20M, and I don’t take anywhere the number you do. That said, the SeeStar can churn them out at a helluva rate but those are at least relatively small at just under 4M per FITS format sub. At the standard exposure time of 10s, an hour is 360*4 = 1.44G and a total exposure time of around 5600 hours (circa 230 days) can be stored on a 8TB disk. Given the weather we have and the fact that it is dark for less than 50% of the time, such a disk would last me well over a year and likely several.
Horses for courses.
Paul