Thanks Fred and Cam!
Cam - I'm not sure that I see the resemblance of the kiwi...
I was having a look at my raw subs today, and noticed that they were actually
better than my stacked version! Hmm... something fishy there.
I double checked in Deep Sky Stacker and it turns out they weren't being aligned properly - I wondered why I couldn't make the colours pop here.
A couple hours of troubleshooting later, it turns out that there was a problem with the flat frames - unchecking them from the stack fixed it. Weird?!
Here's a repro that I much prefer to the original
The colours are "real" (I checked against
Nick Risinger's Sky Survey) but substantially enhanced.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13644418/iis...-1800x1200.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13644418/iis...-5418x3612.jpg
I thought that a B&W rendition had a nice flare to it too - it shows the dark dust lanes more clearly:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13644418/iis...00x1200-BW.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13644418/iis...18x3612-BW.jpg