That's funny Paul
http://www.pbase.com/image/108368456
What did I do?
1. Levels and curves (your primary processing tools, you bring up the image using curves and you move the black point over to the right to it just meets the bell shaped curve to get rid of noise and you repeat this over and over until the image is bright and you aren't getting any improvement).
2. Noise Ninja. It smoothed out the background and got rid of residual noise.
3. Minimum filter on Alnitak. A bit of smudge tool nudging Alnitak a bit rounder.
4. Sponge tool set to desaturate 5% and rubbed it on the blue halo around Alnitak.
5. Minimum filter on a few of the brighter stars -1 pixel and lassoed them first with feather 5 pixels.
6. Curves run separately on red, green and blue to accentuate the red and pull back the lower part of the curve to pullback the darker background where most of the noise lies.
7. Noel Carboni reduce space noise action.
8. Sponge tool set to saturate 5% and rubbed it on the red areas.
9. Selective sharpening - duplicate layer/set to overlay, then filter/other/high pass 3.5 pixels then layer/layer mask/hide all then rub with brush set to white on the horsehead itself only and the flame nebula only.
Layer/Flatten image.
That was about it.
Total time taken - 6 or 7 minutes.
Greg.