Well Richard it has been 6 years now since my 3 consecutive night 20hr effort under perfect dark skies on this galaxy through a 6" telescope and I remember when I was processing what was then unique looking data, the excitement was palpable...I imagine it was very similar in your case here too, so I feel your emotion
. Having lots of data to work with (particularly if captured under truly dark skies) is indeed a pleasure to work with.
Congratulations of a fine image with modest equipment, I can see the full hockey stick shape but the galactic Cirrus is a bit hard to really make out
but one good thing is that you don't look to have simply arbitrarily lassoed the hockey stick shape or used a heavy handed mask and worked on it separately, so it looks natural and to be real scaled data.
So...as many on here will remember I made a reasonable number of reprocessing efforts on my data set and started to annoy some on here with my regular reposts of Centaurus A's
...but in the end the final finished product (4 months later) was worth the many efforts..and the term
doing a Sidonio or
Sidononioing was coined for reprocessing
Hey I can take it
.
So, see if you can reveal the cirrus a bit better, perhaps up the contrast a bit and try processing a version just for the dust lane and (very) carefully blend it back in...
Again great effort and commendable result there
Mike