First real attempt at Deep sky imaging

I tried my hand at a bit of deep sky astrophotography last night. Below is the result:



Details:
LX90 @ f/10 in alt-az mode, 18 x 30sec exposures, ISO 1600.
Sky was a bit hazy and a 75% moon didn't help either, except for purposes of having something to focus onto prior to taking the images.

As I'm a bit new to all this deep sky imaging stuff, I have a couple of questions:
1) Was ISO 1600 a little too much for the conditions or would 800 have been better?
2) I deliberately softened the final shot a bit to make it a bit more aesthetically pleasing? Do I go too far with it? Should I have left it alone?
The way it is now reminds me of how it would look on film.
3) Any other tips?
First I had to manually align and rotate each image in Photoshop- very time consuming!!! When they were all aligned, I then merged them all. I saved my result twice. With one of the images I altered the brightness, contrast, saturation, hue and levels to bring out the stars. I did something similar in the other image to bring out the detail in the nebula itself. Then I merged the two. Took me most of today to just get this one image!
Any suggestions on how to improve on this would be greatly appreciated.

Michael

Cool!

The colours came out really well! Goes to show that in this day of CCDs and web cams there is still a lot to be said for good old "wet" photography!

BB

Ooopps - I meant to say that the camera I have is the Canon EOS 300d (digital slr).
Sorry to disappoint you Bart!

Michael

micheal,
great image, well done.
stephen.

Ooopps - I meant to say that the camera I have is the Canon EOS 300d (digital slr).
Sorry to disappoint you Bart!

Michael

Bugger!

Well, it's a good advertisment for Digital SLR cameras so!

BB

Hi Michael,
Nice one, , you can just make out 2 stars in the center of that nebula, have you worked out whats the faintest magnitude star you cought in that pic ??

I also find image processing a very time consuming operation, much longer then you actually spend at the scope.
You could start up a new hobby as a graphic artist