Nice going Geoff, have to say you have done well for 30secs unguided, speshly at this focal length, slight eggy stars but not bad at all
I see you have a few photos on here now and the images a becoming betterra
I really like your Juup animation also, top work on that
Ive also had a go processing your Eta Car Image, I thought to show that Processing images does play a big part in the final results in images and there are a few main things that can help an image. Your image has good information/data in it, but it does take time to learn how to process astro images for there full worth and I'm still only half way there
In this repro I have done a few basic steps (in Photoshop CS3) to show some potential in your captures !
1) applied 3 areas of Noise reduction, dark areas, mid tone range and brightest zones separately with a 5'ish pixel feather.
2) Increased Levels with approx 15 pixel feather in the same three zones as above at appropriate strengths (minus the stars so not to blow-out)
3) Selected just the stars with Magic wand, increased selection by 2 pixels & a 1 pixel feather, then applied a 1 pixel blur and saturated the colors.
4) Did another weak Noise reduction over the entire image & applied some selective sharpening !
There are tho many ways to go about processing, and it can only comes with practice, my methods in this example are not to be taken as gospel but just a generalization to some areas of basic processing features that can do quite a bit of improvement, Noise, levels, stars & sharpening
Hope this is of help