Why are my milky way shots so bad?
So two nights ago I made my way to a dark-ish (~20.55 mags/arcsec², Bortle 4 - 5) spot to get some Milky Way shots, untracked.
I got 50 lights, 20 darks and around 15 flats. Proper biases were also included in the calibration.
Shot with a Canon EOS Rebel T3i (EOS 600D) and Kit lense at 18 mm f3.5. ISO was at 1600, 20 s exposure untracked.
The stacked and calibrated .fit file can be found here
I stacked and color calibrated in Siril, background extraction via the AutoGradientRemoval python-script. Did some edits in GIMP.
Here are two reuslts of that: 1, 2 (the 2nd one somehow looked better in Gimp?)
Also an example for one of the lights.
My very first attempt (see my profile) yielded way better results and that was shot from a place with much more light pollution.
Do you guys have any pointers for me? I really enjoy the night skies, but fighting this hard for such bad results (compared to some other examples I see on r/astrophotography where people post stunning shots while claiming doing single shots with kit lenses like mine and barely any editing) kinda spoils the fun, so any help will be MUCH appreciated!