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When you adjust colours, use Auto Tone, Auto Contrast, Auto Colour. Then use Colour Balance to fix the rotten job Auto Colour does. Mostly you will only use the Midtones. Bring up the Histogram and set it to All Channels View. Adjust the balance until the RGB curves overlap each other. If you have any colour hanging over the right hand side then you can use Highlights adjustments, but I rarely touch this.
I've brightened this by making a copy of the image to a new layer and set the blend mode to screen. I flatten these 2 layers to 1 layer. I might do this again if I want it brighter, keeping each brightened image in separate windows.
When you screen 2 layers together you brighten faint stars and nebulae, but blow out the already bright areas. Now, by putting the brighter image into a mask in the layer above it you are replacing the blown out areas from the dimmer images.
I copy the images into layers in one image with the brightest image on the bottom of the layer stack. I copy this image to a mask in the layer above it (with the layers above that set to not visible) and Gaussian blur it by 50 pixels (for this resolution). I copy the resulting image on this layer to a mask in the layer above it and Gaussian blur this to 50 pixels, etc, etc, etc, and repeat until I've done it for all the layers above it.
Oh, and I have not applied any sharpening to this image either. That will selectively give the nebulosity a bit of punch and make it appear to be in the foreground, but this takes more than 5 minutes. The colour fix is fast so I did that first.
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