Although I love learning about space, I'm relatively new to astrophotography. My husband bought me a Celestron 8SE for Christmas of 2022, but I didn't really start using it for astrophotography until January 2023. The first space picture I've ever took was of M42 - Orion. I still remember my absolute joy and delight I felt seeing color in the sub exposure. I did rudimentary staking and adjustments in Photoshop, and I was blown away that  I  took a picture of a deep-space object. I thought this was sooo good at the time. haha

First astrophotography image of Orion:


However, as I learned more about astrophotography, I started chasing the pursuit of perfection. Processing my images has been the bane of my existence, and I've always been discouraged by my lack of processing skills. I was still using Photoshop to process my images, and although I had improved, I still didn't feel "worthy" of posting my images online. 

For my sophomore astrophotography year, I decided to download the free trial of PixInsight because I noticed that many of the users on Astrobin used it and the RC Astro plugins. And - holy cow!! - this is amazing!  I followed Delta Astrophotography's tutorial and he explained everything so well. Processing astrophotography using these software tools made the hobby fun. Compared to Photoshop, PixInsight and the RC Astro plugins produced amazing processing results extremely quickly.

For comparison, below is the exact same data, but processed in Photoshop: 


Although I was initially happy with my photoshop results, the PixInsight / RC Astro plugins was able to get so much more detail out of the data in literally a fraction of the time. 

I really, really like this software, but I'm only on the free-trail versions. I'm totally going to have to save up and buy these for real, because this software is literally a game-changer. I'm really excited to learn more about these tools to make my astrophotography processing even better!