Although not new to Astronomy I recently bought the Seestar S50 smart telescope (£529 delivered in UK) to get back into Astronomy. It comes with a high quality small tripod, image shown here is with my existing manfrotto tripod.
Here is an image straight out of the telescope (controlled by an app) exposure 30min.
Here is a processed image of the same stacked photo:
The process is approx as below:
1). Stack raw images (6 frames are taken per min, so 180 frames. Some go through them one by one to manually remove bad frames).
2). Crop the image to remove any stacking artifacts (normally around the edges due to rotation).
3). Do a background extraction to remove uneven light and dark areas across the frame (makes a massive improvement, but complex).
4). Do a Colour calibration to set dark and light areas.
5). Do a photometric calibration which uses existing high resolution photos of the specific object online to balance the colour image.
6). As the image is linear next step is to stretch the image by one or all of these methods, Asinh, histogram, hyperbolic histogram.
7). Remove background green noise as there is no green emissions from space.
8). Apply gentle colour saturation over the RGB image.
9). Further crop the image to focus in more on areas of maximum interest (depends on field of view of the image).
10). Save image as an uncompressed Tiff file for further work.
11). Separate the background & stars from the image to produce two files, one with stars and one without.
12). Process both images in something like Photoshop (I use the free GIMP, as photoshop is expensive and rental only).
13). De-noise the image (use free astrophotography de-noise apps).
14). Make any adjustments to the stars in the image (ie reduce size, number or remove individual stars).
15). Combine background and object image back together and save as one file.
16). Export as uncompressed Tif and JPG as required.
17). Sent image to friends.
Some of the processing tools would be available in Vegas.
Anyone had a go at this. As a beginner in astrophotography I find it very complex and can be very very expensive, luckily there are many free programs available to help.