Had a go doing the crescent nebula I see, You are going to have to reprocess the data, what I see suggests 2 things, firstly the stars have been over sharpened, and you have used some kind of a noise filter.
First calibrate your image with darks and flats ( if you don't have them do them ..... If you don't know how just ask), then take the calibrated image and use curves in Photoshop or similar, just lift it in the middle until you see a good amount of detail, then use the centre eyedropper in levels place in in the bare sky and balance the color, and slide the far left slider almost to the edge of the bell shaped curve. This is the simplest processing youmcould do, Post that and see if there's any improvement, a bit of noise is prefferable to removing detail with a filter. I hope this is taken in a positive light to help and inform.
thanks very much for your advice, will do as you sagest and post again, any help is appreciated, just started processing, I have maxim, photoshop CS, pixelinsit.
Had a go at what you suggested and got this, is this what it should be lick, first image is as calibrated,staked and coloured, second,in photoshop with curves, levels but had to do 5 goes to get it OK, it looks better to me cane I get moor out, thanks for all your help.
That's a vast improvement, although there is some noise it is acceptable, generally you will beat down the noise with more exposures.
At 1.4 megapixels and a 10 inch rcx that would be a fairly small field of view, and you are showing quite reasonable tracking as stars are fairly round, you may find one or two that have lost a little, you could try using a median combine method on this image when you stack and see if it helps a little bit.... It may not.
What I suggest you do, is find the brightest deep sky object to hone your skills on, this will give you the satisfaction of seeing some clear detail and inspire you then to move on to harder things, you will have to forgive me for my lack of northern hemisphere knowledge.... Down here that would be Eta carinae or M42 , then you would move on to m8 . A wild stab would suspect it to be one of the Messier objects, I will have a look in a planetarium program tonight to see if I can find something suitable.
In the meantime have a try at the median combine method, the last image you put up shows promise and given time and experience you will be right up there. If you want to do faint objects it really is about time in exposures ( hours and hours).
you should have the confidence to know what you have can produce the goods.
How large is the calibrated but unprocessed file.... In either tiff or fits ?
If it's small enough I can send you an email address and have a closer look, the jpg does not have enough dynamic range to work with.
