This is my first attempt at imaging a comet.  As a comet noob, I had no idea how involved this would be, and wasn't planning on attempting to image C/2022 E3 ZTF until the weather forecast miraculously changed overnight from cloudy to clear most of the night!

In order to achieve this, I first took 2 hours of 60 second exposures tracking the comet nucleus with PHD2.  Thankfully, it was distinct enough that I didn't need to train PHD2 using the comet tracking tool.  After 2 hours of exposures on the comet, I took an hour of 60 second exposures tracking the star field.

Once complete, I used Astro Pixel Processor to integrate.  Not knowing exactly what settings would work best, I integrated all 3 sessions together using the comet/one-star registration technique.  Then, I integrated the star field separately from the comet using the typical normal integration settings.  To remove the star trails, I switched the "automatic" integration setting to "average" and utilized winsorized rejection filter with kappa high at 3.0 and kappa low at 6.0.  I had tried lowering the kappa high to get more star trail rejection, but I found doing that created too much artifact adjacent to the comet nucleus.

After all of the above, I ended up with two results: a pinpoint star field with a streaky comet head, and a sharp comet with mostly removed star field and some mild background artifacts.

Getting the stars isolated was an easy task with Starnet2++ (especially since I learned how to direct it to utilize my graphics board instead of the CPU!).

Fixing the background artifacts was an order of magnitude more challenging.  I utilized several masks to isolate out the comet, and performed several convolution runs mixed with NoiseXterminator.  That gave a pretty decent result, but after adding the stars, I could still see blatant streaks in the background.  I cloned the comet only picture, and used CloneStamp to paint the entire picture the same off-black matte color that was present in between the streaks.  I then used PixelMath to blend this "paint bucket" universal background color with the comet picture (20% paintbucket + 80% comet).  This eliminated enough of the streaks that I could add the stars back into the picture.

I really enjoyed learning new techniques and coming up with some new workflows in the fly.  I hope you like the finished product!