GIMP=My broke ass just bought hardware and there is nothing left in the cash drawer for software. I think that I am going to drop the $100 on Nebulosity which is built from the ground up for astrophotography. Looks like Lightroom 6 is $150 on Amazon so after everything settles down I'll get something.
I did a work-study stint writing image processing scripts for the astronomy department as a student, and they seemed to do all their image processing programmatically. They favored IDL, but could live with me doing it in Python. Maybe that was a different thing though, all they told me was "there are stars and planets and stuff in all this noise. Make the noise go away, keep the stars. How will you know the difference? Uh, ask someone."
Me? I might rack up some shots and then go play with the good stuff.
The new laptop is already paying dividends. I can now capture in RAW 16 bit colour at 20FPS. I did not notice until I uploaded it to Imgur that the two moons in the frame managed to make it through processing! They are dim dots off to the right if you blow that image up. No GRS tonight, no transits, but all in all pretty cool. Gonna try for a very early Sunday and get Saturn and Mars for the first time of the year.