Imaged comet 2022 E3 (ZTF) on the morning of January 26, 2023.  After all the great images I've seen in the past few weeks, I decided I needed to get in on the fun, so I got up at 4:40 am the past few days and gathered some images. 

• Original post: This was my first try at imaging this comet, and my first comet image in a few years.  I forgot how tough comet image processing, and need to do some work with the latest processing approaches in particular working on eliminating star trails from the comet alinged images and combining comet only and stars only images along the lines of the beautiful results many folks are posting.  Anyhow, here is my first result. I'm really happy with the comet colors and the detail in the ion tail.  More work to be done...
• Updated post:  After lots of reading up, I tried using StarXTerminator as part of the comet processing flow and it worked rather well.  On the plus side, this approach generates a very nice starless comet.  on the minus side, processing 22 subs to remove the starts took 12+ hours on my humble surface laptop (an overnight run for sure).

Imaged with Astrotech AT60 at F/4.8 (288 mm focal length) using Astrotech ATRF60 field flattener/0.8x reducer, UVIRcut filter, and full spectrum modified Nikon D5300.  Total integration time of ~20 minutes from 22 subs at ISO200 x 60 sec.

Pre-processed using Pixinsight's weighted batch pre-processing script (WBPP) to perform calibration, debayering, registration. 

Original version:  Used the comet alignement process to generate a set of comet aligned images and integrated using image integration.  Tried StarXTerminator to remove the trailed stars with little success.  Post-processing in Pixinsight:  background removal using ABE, noise x terminator, masked stretch, generalized hyperbolic stretch, curves transformation, HDR transformation, and local histogram normalization.

Updated version:  Starting with the calibrated and registered subs, I applied the StarXTerminator process in batch mode to remove the stars from each sub.  I then comet aligned the starless subs using the comet alignment process, and used the integration process to generate the starless comet master.  I then made another pass through the comet alignment process in subtract mode using the original registered subs (with stars) and the starless comet master for the subtract operand image.  This generates comet aligned stars only images which I integrated to create stars only master.  I then combined the starless comet master and stars only master using the pixelmath process (stars only master + 2x comet master).  From there it was the standard post-processing flow in Pixinsight:  background removal using ABE, spcc, BlurXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator, masked stretch, generalized hyperbolic stretch, curves transformation, and HDR transformation.