Whirlpool Galaxy

Good that you're getting 120secs unguided, you must have hardly any periodic error in your drive, and that has led to a good result.

With regards camera noise, I can already say that my new camera is a lot less noisy than the 300D - this is without using any of the inbuilt noise reduction and is based on a comparison of RAW dark frames in IRIS. Whether or not this is due to tech advances in chip design, or just that the 300D is 10 years old and has seen a lot of use. With the 300D, I found that the extra gain in sensitivity at ISO 1600 wasn't worth the extra noise. There is an article somewhere in the IRIS webpages that compares noise at different ISO settings. The general consensus of opinion is that ISO 800 is the optimal setting. There are a number of ways of reducing noise...the best is simply to take more images to stack. With 30 or so subs, a sigma-median stack in IRIS pretty much removes any stray hot pixels, and even does a decent job with satellite and aircraft trails.

Looking forwards to seeing more of your images.

Paul.