Robin - too much time - don't tell my wife or my list of jobs will get bigger!
The darks (6 of them) I ran at 1pm when I shut everything else down and locked up my little home made astrolab. I figure just cause I'm sleepy it doesn't mean my gear has to rest. Whenever its cloudy I guess I can use the time to take darks of a specific duration and use Deep Sky Stacker to turn them into a master dark tif for that duration.
Marcus,
Again thanks - you're probably right - I'm only now getting to the point where I understand what back clipping is. My processing generally is
Stack, dark frame and flat field and colour balance (align left hand edges of all coulur channels) and up saturation (21%) - in DSS (also I move the luminance curve to coincide with the start of my histograms)
Strech in either MaximDL or CS4
On the really dim zone - clip a bit to remove the worst light pollution and/ or do a heavy Gaussian Blur with CS4
On the dim / mid zone - do a bit of unsharp masking
On the bright zone - minor edits in curves just so things are swamped
Finalise the relative brightness of different zones using a fancy curve in CS4
Shrink and post here if I think its good enough
I don't yet use layers in CS4 to more precisely target my filters and processing - so I'm at a really basic stage of learning. If in a year I could do half of what Jase and other manage in CS4 - I'd be delighted!
Matt