ABSTRACT
It is easy to take stars for granted and yet they pose some of the most difficult objects to process. The problem is that we instinctively know what a star should look like... or do we? Theoretically, all stars should be a single illuminated pixel on account of their distance and yet we accept the concept that brighter stars appear larger than dimmer ones. The question remains, how much is enough? Pictorially, stars can visually get in the way of the purpose of an image: consider a dim nebula in the Milky Way, the eye is distracted by the numerous bright punctuations and as a result it is harder to distinguish the gaseous clouds within. In this case, some photographers go to the extreme of removing the stars altogether while others leave them to bloat naturally with image stretching. I aim somewhere in the middle, keeping true to nature but trying to avoid them detracting from the image. In other images they are the “star” of the show and processing is optimized to show their individuality: color, size, definition and symmetry.
