Thanks for the encouraging comments.
It was painful looking at all the great photos from other people and not being able to take them myself. It was a long learning curve. I am all excited and ready to go again but it is very windy tonight
Trevor, the images were taken with ED80. The diffraction spikes were added in PS, as per this
guide on ice in space. I don't like to add too many of them as they can be distracting from the rest of the image.
Regarding the processing, not being able to align the mount for almost a year made me read any guide I could find on the net and try different things on photos taken with a tripod/horribly aligned EQ5. As the exposure time was always very short, I learned to push things to the limit to get the detail out which actually seems to be paying off.
A good guide for the layermask in PS with M42 as example is
here.
P.S. I made one image with tracking and I am already thinking of guiding
