Thanks Peter..
It also says quite a lot about the helpfulness of this wonderful forum... without which I never would have taken an astro-image. Let alone made such an improvement in 10 months...
A couple of things that really helped with that comparison...
1 - The original did not use flats (clearly)
2 - I've learnt a lot about processing in the past 10 months..
3 - Dedication to producing a few good images rather than many many average images.
Back in December of last year when the original horse head image was taken, I did not understand calibration at all, I was fairly new to guiding etc.. The equipment I had far surpassed my capabilities too..
Thanks to many online tutorials, many questions I posted on these forums and tips and hints I was given after posting some of my early images have really reshaped my way of approaching an image im fairly certain that I did not realise you could use curves multiple times at the time of processing the original horse head shot.. I think that was just a single iteration of curves, single iteration of levels, and a single, agressive pass of unsharp mask.. as opposed to many subtle iterations of curves and levels to gently bring out the information, and many, subtle, selective sharpen iterations along with a few iterations of deconvolution to bring out the detail..
Finally, after seeing many images from people like Jase, Mike Sidonio, Greg Bradley, Fred Vanderhaven, Marcus Davies, Peter Ward, Tom Davis etc etc etc. All with exposure lengths up in 10~25 hour mark, I realised that while you can get 10 targets in one night if you wish.. You will be looking at maybe 45~50 minute total exposure images, which will not have fantastic depth, rich colours and faint detail, what you will have is a rough image rife with noise and artefacts from over-stretching...
These days I generally go for between 7~10 hours exposure on any given image unless its just a quicky to fill in time before the next target gets high enough to start imaging... There is no substitute for plenty of raw data.. you can have the best camera, best mount, best optics etc, if you only do 2 hours exposure, your image will still only have 2 hours worth of data to play with..
The Horse head I originally posted in this thread has 6hrs 40minutes of Ha (20 minute subs) and 2hrs of colour data. Its been calibrated carefully with flats, flat darks, and darks, and has been processed a lot more carefully than the one from december last year which was 1hrs 20min total exposure (6x600sec + 1x1200sec)
All in all, the equipment used isn't much different than the shot from December last year, in some cases I actually had better gear back then..
Images take with:
December last year:
WO Megrez 102mm F/7 ED Doublet.
QHY8
EQ6 Pro (Guided with WO ZS66SD + DBK31 through EQMOD)
October this year:
TMB/LOMO 80mm F/6 triplet:
Much better than the Megrez 102.
Orion SS Pro:
Not up to the same level as the QHY8 in quality, much more noise, not as heavily cooled etc.. although the reflection on the Orion SS pro is much more subdued than with the QHY8.. The QHY8's reflection can be addressed and rectified, the Orion's can not.
HEQ5 Pro:
Well, Its no EQ6 Pro, thats for sure.
Guided with WO ZS70ED + QHY5 through ST4 connection:
Much the same, although the QHY5's guiding capabilities far exceed that of the DBK31's, the little bit of extra aperture may or may not have helped, and the optical quality of the guider is much the same..
To be very honest, I think the major differences in the two images comes directly from processing, and understanding of capture methods and equipment setup (polar alignment, minimised flexture, proper balancing etc)
The difference in equipment is not great enough to explain the difference in the images...
Wow.. quite the rant..
haha
Images from 10 Chain Hill.. :)
Now, This, I am impressed with. I dont know if the colours are right, and I dont really care 
Absolutely love the HH. Framing, colors and look at that details 
. Tarantula is way cool too. You got a lot of very faintstuff in that shot. As for Eta, well .. grandiose! 
Here's a quick trick you can try on your Eta shot. in PS, go to Filter>Noise>Reduce Noise & play with the sliders to get rid of the star colors - see attached shots. Also did it on your star version.
