The stars in your images do not look bloated to me, comparing them to other high-end imagers on the web. They look relatively large due to the image scale that you are working at. Stars that are bloated by differing exposures from the bright foreground stars verses faint background nebulous detail can be shrunk early in processing using: 1) Clip-stretching with a maximum threshold reduction 2) Gamma brightness stretching [then stack] 3) Richardson-Lucy deconvolution 4) Combinations of 2 and 3. The main trick appears to be only clipping and stretching the image to reduce only the maximum side of the brightness histogram. That reduces the number of pixels displaying for the bright stars but does not reduce the detail in the faint nebula. But, not being an experienced imager, I'm hesitant to discuss it. See notes at - http://gallery.utahastronomy.com/v/kurt/KafAIP4WIN/BloatStar/ - Kurt _______________________________________________ Sent via CSolutions - http://www.csolutions.net