Next stage is to delve into stacking. Many photo editing programs do allow stacking, basically any software that allows the use of layers. Nevertheless please note that with wide lenses you may get noticeable rotation between frames and that will require alignment on two stars, widely spaced. One nice thing about stacking is that all that peppery noise (hot pixels) gets smeared out since the sky does not stay still within the camera frame. The stars move, the hot pixels stay at the same locations. Hence, for a reasonably noise-free camera, like the current Canon DSLRs, hot pixels are simply not an issue. Stacking allows more aggressive post processing, especially welcome as you move to shoot dimmer patches of sky. It is this aggressiveness that necessitates the use of Raw capture, followed by conversion to 48-bit files. How many frames to stack? The above is a stack of 8 (= 80 sec total integration time). You can never have too many! To get those great images you see in magazines usually requires integration times varying from an hour to more than 10 hours. But I'd suggest that you aim to have an integration time of at least a few minutes at f2.8 for your early efforts. That should give you enough frames to start getting the hang of post processing. The best current software for DSLR astrophotography is ImagesPlus.