As thanks for the coming weeks of cloudless nights, I'll offer a few words of encouragement re the impending cataract surgery:
Haven't had it done personally, but one of the local town characters here who did, said the results were almost unbelievably good, says his eyesight now is like a teenager's.
So perhaps you'll be able to save a lot of money in future and go back to visual astronomy
Second 'glass half full' is that you picked the right body parts to have repaired, some of the lower extremities would be far less pleasant in their outcomes.
Best of luck and hope all turns out well.
Btw, I processed last night's open cluster work in APP today, the stacked files from my 2600mc were 317MB, so RAM and more RAM! One of the shots took about two hours to integrate, but that was with 190 60s 50MB subs. An i7 -9700 16GB tiny pc Lenovo does the work.