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This is a good image Robert. Really good.
There appears to be a slight tilt in your optics train (camera sagging in the focsuer perhaps?) as the bottom left looks slightly out of focus whereas the right hand side is sharp.
Also, you've done a lot of things right here - nice colours, the stars have colours (yeah! DSLR images often show the stars as white when they are not all white).
But dude - why only 30 minutes? You stopped when you were on a roll mate!
There is a culture in the DSLR world where 10 minutes is a long image exposure. I don't get it.
In the CCD world 1.5 hours is a bare minimum and 6-50 hours is really going for it. And CCD cameras are usually more sensitive than DSLRs.
There is one guy I forget his name -who does really long exposure DSLR images at the Yahoo digital astro group. His images with a 20Da rival fine CCD images.
So do exactly what you did (except check for camera sag) and do another 3 hours and you'd have a whammy of an image! You can't process the signal if it isn't there in the first place and you get the signal with lots of exposure time. I have found my best images really required the least processing because it was all there in the first place. We kind of work hard in the processing department when something is deficient in the basics.
Basics done well and long makes the excellent image not Photoshop magic.
Greg.
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