Presenting my capture of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) from January 30, 2023, on an oppressively-cold -25°C winter’s night in Skull Valley, Utah, United States. Turns out metal left out for a few hours at these temperatures somehow “burns” when you touch it!

This was shortly before the comet’s near pass around February 2nd under a 72% Waxing Gibbous moon—mercifully not near the comet—on a clear night with good sky conditions. I captured 175x30s exposures with a 2600MC-Pro and my 80mm  refractor (390mm). At 30s the core was just staring to show signs of trailing. My only regret is not spending some time enjoying the comet through binoculars, but after 20 minutes of trouble-shooting a cable issue at those temperatures, the only thought on my mind was taking shelter in my car.

Processing was handled in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop. See below this paragraph for a link to a text file featuring detailed processing notes. StarXTerminator was used to strip stars from debayered RGB channel images (separated because, after testing, I found this produced better removal) and the resulting starless images were aligned with CometAlignment, normalized, and integrated. A separate stars image was prepared using star aligned images with CometAlignment using the comet images as an operand for subtraction. Color calibration was captured using the original integrated images (from WBPP) and transferred with the ColorCalibraiton process to the comet images and stars were calibrated with SPCC (I ended up using the original integration stars for the star field). A shorter comet integration was also created to capture more detail in the ion tail. Comet image was cleaned up (e.g. incomplete frame rejection, reduction of trailing from galaxies) in Photoshop, stars restored in PixInsight and reduced via Bill Blanshan’s method, and final adjustments and cleanup handled in Photoshop.

That’s a quick summary. Processing was a lot more involved than this and included a fair amount of trial and error. Here is a link to a text file featuring my full processing notes:
http://tinyurl.com/JP2022ZTF

And I want to extend a hat-tip to @Adam Block on this one. His timely comet-processing tutorials, with details shared in his PixInsight Horizons program, introduced me to some solutions which helped out quite a bit in getting past a couple pain points.