The Magic Of Image Post Processing

Looking online it seems a lot of people post process their pictures in LightRoom. I don't want to pay a monthly fee so I found similar free software called DarkTable and decided to play around with it. Wow, the difference is incredible. I barely know what I'm doing and in about ten minutes made my star trails picture so much nicer:

Image from December 4 with no post processing

Image from December 4 processed in DarkTable