Thanks for taking the time to look & Comment -
Firstly it wasn't really fair to flame the scope - its a great unit for the price - it had a SBIG camera and an OPTEC Focuser hanging off the back and thats a fair bit of weight - it coped as best it could - for visual work it is excellent. Value for money - Certainly.
Image Exposure - total 12 hours over 4 nights - 5 hours Luminance and 7 Hours Colour. Both shot in sequences of 120 sec-300sec-600sec & 1200 Sec Flats & Darks applied - chip temp -25 both units. Images processed and aligned in Maxim V5 and CCDStack. Colour combination and assembly in CS3 - (which was were it all went wrong)
Intent was to create a HDR image to include the background stars of the Milky Way - technical ability not up to the task yet - hence the soft image - I got lost somewhere in the layer and masking system of Photoshop.
http://www.pbase.com/loc46south/image/114727702
Luminance image to give some idea of how it should have ended up - will try again later.
Cheers