Combining Aperture Libraries on a MacBook Pro and an External Hard Drive

Hi all,
I'm hoping that you might be able to help me with a little advice!
Having taken the plunge and recently invested in a MacBook Pro, I have a couple of questions regarding use of the iPhoto/Aperture library.
I have already invested in Aperture for its' advanced editing features - which is great so far. However, the MacBook is the 13" retina with 512GB of storage - and, whilst still quite large, I'm worried that I'll quickly run out of storage as I do take rather alot of photos! So far, I've only imported my library from my iPhone and it tells me that I've already filled 20GB with photos (and I only had about 6GB of photos on my phone so I'm not sure what's happened there).
On my old non-Mac computer, I have approximately 250GB of photos which I'm reluctant to copy onto the MacBook for fear of instantly bogging it down by clogging up half of the memory. Ideally, what I would like to do is import the pictures (so I can still see them and still have a 'hard copy') so that they're in iPhoto - and then export the entire iPhoto library to an external hard drive (I've read about having it in the 'journaled' format so that should be OK). The EHD would then be regularly backed up.
However, for times when I'm away (eg, on holiday and fancy doing a bit of photo editing if I've got a couple of hours free), I don't much want to have to lug the hard-drive round with me.
Would it be possible to keep the "main" iPhoto library on the EHD - and then just import albums into it (from the MacBook) at regular intervals. For example, if I go away for a fortnight and come back with 14 new albums, can I merge these 14 albums with the iPhoto library stored on the EHD? I've read that Aperture can manage multiple libraries - but I'm not sure if it's designed to be used in this way...
Any help would be much appreciated!!!
Thanks,
James

James,
the title of your question is  saying "Aperture", but in the body you are asking about iPhoto libraries.
Have you previously worked with iPhoto and are considering to switch to Aperture?
Would it be possible to keep the "main" iPhoto library on the EHD - and then just import albums into it (from the MacBook) at regular intervals. For example, if I go away for a fortnight and come back with 14 new albums, can I merge these 14 albums with the iPhoto library stored on the EHD? I've read that Aperture can manage multiple libraries - but I'm not sure if it's designed to be used in this way...
Any help would be much appreciated!!!
Aperture and iPhoto now share a unified library format. If you are having the latest version of iPhoto and of Aperture, both applications can open and update each others libraries.
Aperture 3.3: Using a unified photo library with iPhoto and Aperture
If you have multiple iPhoto libraries, you can easily consolidate them into one library, that could reside on an external drive.
if you want to use Aperture while on the road, with the external drive disconnected, you could export a small, partial aperture library from your main library with the projects you are currently working on, an later merge this working set back into your main library. That is, what I am doing when on vacation, and I'm only taking my MacBook Pro with me.
        Aperture 3.3: How to use Aperture to merge iPhoto libraries          

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