Stacked some star photos. Used MEDIAN. Are these the results I should get?

[battletone]

So here is my first attempt at using MEDIAN on a stacked smart object in CS4. For whatever reason, turning my 16 bit tiffs to 8 bit allowed CS4 to auto align them. The Milky Way didn't quick come out how I thought it would...it just stayed as a cloud.

I took 8 shots. 30 seconds each. These were ISO1600. 18mm. f3.5.

I was under the impression that Median gives much more detail than just simply reducing the noise, but maybe that requires more than 8 exposures?

Here are some examples of 100% crops, both of a single frame, of the stocked median image, both with an equal exposure boost, and the median/exposure image with some NR.
Finished off with a slightly more processed final image.

-Single frame crop

-Median crop

-Single frame crop exposure boost

-Median crop exposure boost

-Median crop NR exposure boost

-Median image after a few more adjustments

 

[battletone]

Well, I have a question, is that a planet in my crop? Saturn?