I recommend that you get Meade's Image Processor under your belt, especially using the Histogram function.  Generally on the first screen, pick the left pointer to the peak of the histogram and the right pointer to a position on the right side of the peak about 3/4 of the way down.  You may find a adjusting these end points provides better results depending on the image you are processing.

On the second screen, adjusting logarithmically anywhere from 2 to 5 times may provide useable results.  I suggest you do not save the FTS file after the Histogram adjustment unless you are going to publish the results, and it that case give it another name - sometimes this is not an option, so do post processing with a copy of the observation data.  Also, you may find your computer doesn't crash as much with the Meade software if you do a screen capture of the Image Processor's screen using windows cut and paste instead of the image processor's file save screen menu item.

You also may want to try the spectrum selector.  The default is 256 shades of gray.  The 256 colors selection can make some images much easier to see when it is converted to 8 bit color.

And, if you use Adobe Photoshop, the FITS Liberator from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (a free download), is another way to import FITS 16 or 32 bit images into RGB color. 

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