i'm guessing you used some kind of professional SLR?
you gotta tell me how you did that 
Really good astrophotography is actually done with dedicated sensors make just for the job. You can link up an SLR to a telescope with good results, but the best results come from pretty big CCD sensors with lower resolution (like 6mp) and no anti-alias filter and even built in cooling on some.. Those big lower resolution sensors mean higher sensitivity to light with less noise.
I would love to get into astrophotography, I have done quite a few star-trails images by stacking 30s exposures in PS. But to really get into it further with a nice telescope, mount, tracker and sensor = $$$$$ that I don't have right now.
Anyway, a very nice image for your first attempt, please do share what gear you used, I'm interested as well?