Nice start Jeff and welcome to the world of astro-imaging!! As a fairly recent entrant myself (2007) I can tell you there's a lot to learn, especially on the processing front. I learn something new every time it seems!!
As Chris demonstrated, looks like your image would benefit from some more photoshop technique so my initial tips (trusting I'm not telling you how to suck eggs) would be:
- Learn how to use levels and curves using adjustment layers and masks. Adjustment layers give you a lot of flexibility to backtrack & tune adjustments. Masking is critical so that you can selectively blend areas of different layers.
- There's nuance to masks as well - egs: feathering / blurring and or adjusting brightness & contrast of masks (via levels & curves) is important and being able to automatically generate masks for adjustment layers based on selections is quite powerful
- Figure out how to to "real" unsharp masking (not the PS menu option). Just google and you'll find the recipe.
- Figure out how to isolate stars from adjustments so you can avoid the washed out star syndrome.
- Get some sharpening and noise reduction tools (a few $US) that have PS plugins.
- Some of Noel Carboni's PS actions look quite useful too provided you use the results carefully (ie blending using layers & masks on top of your own processing effort). I've only started experimenting with them in the last couple of weeks. If nothing else, analysing the steps in some of his actions is a PS learning experience too.
- Learn what the RGB histograms should look like for typical and well balanced nebula and galaxy images.
- Preserve older versions of your image. Sometimes my processing yields versions that have different strengths and weaknesses. Being able to pick the best elements from each can be beneficial.
Have fun!
Cheers, Marcus