StarTools

Greetings. Here is this year's effort on this classic pair. Image details on the Astobin site. Thanks for looking.

How do you keep your brighter stars looking decent? I always have trouble with them as they seem to get over stretched and turn into blobs. "tighten" and "reduce" under Sometimes I remove all the stars and then replace them with less aggressively stretched ones. This just adds another step to processing and if there is a way to avoid it, I'd like to know.
thanks.
Mike

Using the Ha as a luminance layer really helps to keep the stars from bloating. For stars like Altinak, I generally remove them with the heal module and then layer a less stretched version back in.

Nice work! Thanks for posting.

I've used the trick of Ha stars too and that does work pretty well. It just that sometimes I don't have Ha available and luminance channel stars can start too look quite bad. I recently found that masking them out during noise reduction helps some.

loveley image great work