M3 on the 18-55mm kit lens

I took a photo of the M3 globular cluster with the kit lens. There were more stars, but this seems to be the interesting bit. I used DSS and there were 15 lights at 200 ISO each and 10 second exposure. I don't know why everything is a bit elongated though. I thought 10 seconds was not going to be too much.

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I just noticed that I have a lot of noise in my pictures. Is there a particular reason why this would be the case? Could it be due to being a 100% crop, or because it is summer and therefore warmer than the spring?

One other thing that I did with my camera since the summer is that I cleaned the sensor. I used the Lenspen SensorKlear thing. It has removed much of the dirt on the sensor, but could it have introduced more noise into the camera sensor?

Thanks.

I'm guessing that wasn't at 18mm, because the stars do seem to have smudged a bit more than I would expect, so I'm assuming this was at 55mm. In which case, you can only shoot for a few seconds at that FL before trails start to appear...it's surprising how fast things move.

Not sure about the noise though. It's weird, you've got sort of streaks all over the image, travelling in the direction of the stars.

when you're stacking images in any software be it PS, DSS, IRIS or other. You need to also stack in "dark" frames. These are simply the same exact setting as your other images but with the lens cap on. These are temp dependent so don't go in the house and take them. They will cancel out the noise, general rule is to apply at least 30%. So 15 lights, 5 darks.

I added in the dark frames into DSS. It even made the MasterDark file. I do the dark files at the end, due to the problems I have with focussing. I had 20 minutes of photos that I had to delete because I managed to lose focus when I put the camera back on the tripod.

I thought 10 seconds would be sufficient for 55mm, but it seems it is too much. I noticed that when I look at it on 100%, then the stars look elongated, but at lower resolutions they don't.

I never tried to use the kit lens for astro, but I use a 50mm and 85mm prime. I use a fat rubberband to hold the focus in place once found. That way as the temps change the focus shouldn't. If you don't have a telescope mount to use over a tripod, I'd highly suggest trying a barndoor tracker.

http://en.wikipedia.or​g/wiki/Barn_door_track​er
type in that into google and check out the images, some crazy looking ones and some really simple ones mounted to a tripod head

You'll need to use the USB cable or shutter remote to do longer exposures over 30s once on a tracking mount. Piggy backed on my telescope I can get 4-5min exposures before I see tailing.