I've been tinkering with this myself in the past few months, and there is a lot to it. As a previous poster suggested, try to get some landscape in there. An 8-16mm lens should let you do that , i'm only using an 18-125mm zoom, but will shortly invest in a 14mm. Pick the time when the MW is more vertical in the sky to let you do that.You probably know the basics, as you don't have any star streaking, which is usually the first thing people get wrong. ISO 3200, f4 to f5 and 15 sec exposure seem to work OK to start with. Are you using Lightroom for PP? If so, take a good look at your tone curves after you have used exposure, contrast and clarity. Noise reduction will also be needed, maybe try some sharpening first. The tone curves seem to really bring out the colours and patterns in the MW--with a good camera and lens, you will pick up an enormous amount of detail with the right PP. And, right down the bottom, try a bit of De-haze, can be very powerful when used sparingly. Don't be afraid to push those sliders, all your editing in RAW is non-destructive anyway.
As i said, i haven't been doing this night photography for long, but my results are improving. Have a look at this gallery--the one at the very top is the first I ever took with the K-x
Night - ranmar Some of them are obvious crap, but they were put in here to be posted asking where I went wrong, or enquiring about a particular aspect of operation.