For those just starting put in this great hobby, I wanted to pass on a tip about any computer you may be considering for processing your images.
One of the better process steps when processing Nebulae is to remove the stars after background extraction and color calibration. Removing the stars is recommended because as you stretch your image to try to isolate the colors such as blue, too strong and the stars will take on a bluish hue, There are 2 programs for this process: StarNet and StarXterminator. StarNet is free and you can YouTube directions on how to apply it. Personally, I find that StarNet leaves a bit of a hazy appearance to my images so I elected to purchase StarX.
However, your computer needs certain requirements in order to run these programs. The CPU must support AVX and/or AVX2 extension sets. You can google your CPU and see if those are supported, because without that support, these programs will not operate.
I know this from painful experience when I bought a laptop to initially run my rig and process images. My laptop has a CPU that does not support these extension sets so I had to buy a new desktop with an i7 7700 CPU which works well. I bought the laptop before I knew what I was doing and now it sits on a shelf.
Just wanted to point that out.
. Good to hear you are working things out and are willing to share your experiences with the community.