MartinB

That's very interesting and helpful, thanks Mark. Not worth any angst though, Alnitak creates an extreme situation and a quick Photoshop 100% radial blur on Alnitak will have it fixed in a jiffy!

Welcome to SGL Korhag and a very nice Auriga, a constellation I am imaging a lot at the moment. Some nice star colour there.

That's very true but a pair of gloves are cheaper ?

I have a Berlbach uni 18 which I use to carry a substantial alt az mount. My Celestron CGEM has a steel mount and is used both for imaging and observing. I am always on grass and am happy with steel. If I needed to buy a tripod I would go with the Berlbach but don't feel that the benefit would justify the cost for use on soft surfaces. It's easy to exaggerate marginal gains, especially when you have forked out a lot of money!

Great first hubble palate NB. With regard to halos there are any number of methods or removing and you probably need to know a few to deal with different situations. One curde but very effective way in PS is to apply a blur in photoshop using filter/ dust and scratches to your stretched colour layer. Don't over do this since you loose colour intensity and don't try to eliminate all the stars. Layer the blurred colour image onto your luminence using colour as the blend mode. Then be brutal! use the clone stamp or healing brush (for smaller stars) over the offending stars and halos. Most of the time this will work nicely but it can be a bit labour intensive. One thing to watch out for when using big blurs is that colour can be stripped from fine filaments. You can get around this by layering an unblurred colour image over your blurred one and then just revealing the colour filaments using a layer mask. This is all very un pixinsight and will horrify processing purists!

A very lean year for me. Away a lot and also spending more time on night time landscape photos. Need to get my dome automated!

Is your middle picture an LRGB then, it can't be a luminance image? I can make it work with an LRGB image although it does blur my galaxy a little