Thanks for the kind words of encouragement all. As I am retired this is now my full time job. It has many benefits Mike, the main one being it saves me from losing my marbles. A lot of what I am doing is driven by knowledge gained on this and other forums or is that fora.
Yes Jase all those images are HDR's. I have worked out that colour balance etc should be adjusted consistently and carefully for all images used to generate the final tone mapped image. That way the final image only needs a tiny tweak. Like everything it is a matter of practice.
The Carina image is from 10X(2m, 4m and 8m) at 400ISO and f/5 with the Canon F2.8L 300mm lens. Fridge at -5C. So the sensor was at 12C.
I reprocessed the data at 6k pixels wide. The Canon 5DH sensor is 4.3k wide. The sampling vertically and horizontally is about 0.7 that of the diagonal. This is due to effectively square pixel sensors. It has more to do with the intrinsic spacing of the sensor pixels.
This stacking with dithered images should make the sampling more uniform. So here is a large image 7433x5175 pixels in size. If you view it on a typical monitor at 100% the full image is 2.2m wide. I used a bit of RL enhancement.
Large image 15.7MB
http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.co.../ecarlarge.jpg
If you look carefully the the hand of the fickle finger is just visible. not bad for a 300mm F.L. optic!
Bert