Jumping on the bandwagon here, I finally processed the data I captured on January 18 just before dawn!  Or I should say, I finally finished processing data that I first tried to process on January 19!  The FOMO was strong with this one -- this so-called "green comet" (don't they all turn green when they get this close to the sun???) is a pop-culture sensation, and everyone is posting their images all over Astrobin and IG.  I've been frustrated by the lack of clear skies, lack of time, and the general difficulty of processing this data.  Although I'm not completely thrilled with this result, I've concluded that this is the best I can do with the data that I got for now.

Perhaps if astronomers would come up with catchier names, the general public wouldn't focus so much on this comet's greenness.  This emerald ball of dirty snow is a visitor from the outer reaches of our solar system, which last passed our way 50,000 years ago, during the early Upper Paleolithic.  Was it bright enough at that time that our modern human ancestors or their Neanderthal contemporaries who looked up at the absolutely clear LP-free skies after their cook fires died down could make out a greenish smudge and wonder what was the meaning of this great portent?  What did their shamans make of it, and what stories did they tell?

I captured this with my FLT91 just before dawn on January 18, between 4:41 am and 5:52 am: thirty 1-minute Luminance frames, and ten each of 1-minute R, G, and B.  I tracked the comet's core with PhD2, and it worked out ok since the comet wasn't moving too fast against the background stars.  At the same time, I was also urgently trying to capture the comet with my 9.25" EdgeHD, but I was having trouble tracking and focus was off.  And I'm not good at multitasking -- after being up most of the night, I consider myself lucky to have captured any data at all before the sky started getting too bright.

Processing... ugh! My first attempt was disastrous, but coincidentally by the weekend, Pixinsight dropped the new version of the CometAlignment tool and, energized and motivated, I made my first real attempt.  It started out so well! I used StarXTerminator to batch process the calibrated frames, creating starless and stars-only versions of all of them before integrating each group separately.  The CometAlignment tool worked great-- definitely seemed better and easier to use than the earlier version, although I hadn't spent too much time with it.  Pretty quickly I had LRGB combined linear stacks of the comet, and separately, the stars, which used SPCC on to try to tune the colors.  Then I was stuck for two weeks:  no matter how aggressively I DBE'd the crap out of the starless comet stack, there were so many artifacts in the background once I stretched it that the data seemed almost unusable.  Finally, in a last-ditch attempt yesterday of multiple background extractions, comet masking, and histogram adjusting, I was able to clean it up enough to stretch.

Will this first attempt be my last attempt?  Not sure yet.  I did capture some more data last weekend; but this time, tracking the comet's core led to significant star trailing even with one-minute exposures.  I'm not quite sure how so many people are getting even 2-minute exposures.  We'll see -- now that the comet is high up in the evening sky, and it looks like we might have clear skies tonight, may try my luck again.

Clear Skies!