The evolution of an image

I know I've been somewhat obsessed with this photo I took the other night...It was one of those magical moments and I was lucky enough to have my camera there with me and hit the shutter at the right time. It's definitely one of the best images I've made. Here are the basics of how it was processed:

The photo on the left is the original capture, after I cropped it to square. Then the following adjustments were made in Snapseed (damn you Google, for killing off my favorite app): decreased the exposure, increased the contrast, pulled down the saturation a bit, and added structure and sharpness. Back in Aperture I retouched the image a bit to remove a couple of light spots (e.g., that dot at the left hand edge of the image; the series of little green X's in the upper left), which yielded the middle image (the version I posted yesterday). Then using the Nik Silver Efex plugin in Aperture, I did a basic conversion to black and white (no filters, little, if any, fine tuning the exposure/contrast), which resulted the final image on the right.