My old
poor M42 was done with 15sec subs from light polluted suburbia, unmodded Nikon. Lots of them. My guess is you havent learnt how to tease out the faint signal from an integrated image yet and not a light pollution/setting/equipment problem. I suggest you browse you tube for tutorials on processing (regardless of program) and learn to understand a methodology to approach each problem you encounter. DSS and photoshop I consider poor choices to use, as they are limited in what they will let you do to process, thats why PixInsight, Nebulosity, Star Tools, Astro Art etc all exist and they all have the features to help, you just need to learn to understand what and when you need to use a feature.