nice shot humayun, i was quite willing to take the credit for it
not a big fan of the spikes myself though, but that's just a personal thing..
I think the harder bit to capture is the reddish brown nebulosity around the Merope /Tempel Nebula region, which many shots of M45 fail to capture (including mine ), but is very obvious in your image..the dark skies of Coona paid off I guess
and hi there louie
narayan