Well, I've spent entirely too much time on this photograph. And I think I'm mostly posting it as an example of a failure of sorts. But I'll open up the stage to debate what could/should be done, if anything? Perhaps this is better posted in the critique section, but maybe it's a showcase and I just can't see it because my eyes are cross eyed now from looking at this too long.
What I'm posting is a dark version edit, light version edit, the original star trails blend which is a few minute exposure for the foreground, and the sky exposure which is roughly 20 seconds or so for the stars. The sky looks good and the foreground looks good, but when I slam them together they seem to melt down. I'm blaming it on color theory. Also, I'm to the point where I feel like if I'm going to put this much time into a photograph, it should be a lot more interesting.
But I'm curious to hear your thoughts on these. The last two are just raw processing, sharpened, and saved as JPG for web. No noise reduction, and simply to show essentially the "negatives" where I start from.