Nice one Tom
lots of faint nebulosity and detail there!
Looks like the filter has been messing with the colour balance as they both look a little blue/green to me, and while I've not tried using a filter yet, since I've had my camera modded I've had to dial the red channel back to make it look more pleasing...so maybe one thing to try is to use the grey picker in a curves layer and pick a pixel in a dark area of the image. That should take a rough stab at the colour balance and it should be easier to work on from there. Anyhow, just a thought.
In reality, how do or should objects really look? Well, IMO that's a very good question. It's your image, so it looks good when you like it
