Originally posted by emalvick 
For night/astro-photography, I use DeepSky Stacker primarily. It does more than a typical layering tool can do if you can follow the sometimes less than perfect steps to get an image out of the software. I don't think it'll take RAW (although I think it might have taken the DNG's out of my camera), but I always make sure to have a Tiff at the end so that I can use LR again on it (keep at 16 bits).
Generally though, you'll be hard pressed to find a software that is a RAW developer that does layers too. ACR+Photoshop are about as close as you can get.
As far as budget goes, when I was a student, I made sure to buy software at a student discount. LR used to cost me $75 at that time. A lot of photography software (from bigger companies) has student or education discounts, so always be sure to check or inquire about such things if you think you qualify.
My problem is I can't figure out how DSS works lol, maybe I'm just dumb but I'm following a few youtube videos and I never get anything. I also probably need to take more than 50 photos to make a better image idk
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