Suggestions for dealing with lots of tiny stars

[joelshort]

Last summer/fall I took some images of the veil nebula from a dark sky site.   It was nice and transparent and the resulting images have millions upon millions of stars across the field.  I'm reprocessing the data now that I'm a bit more familiar with PI and I now remember why I struggled so much with this particular image.  All the stars make it really hard to stretch the nebula such that the nebula stands out and the stars don't overwhelm the image. 

I'd like to get advice from more advanced users as to how to deal with the stars and overall image.  One thing I might try is to duplicate the images and process one for the stars and one for the nebula and combine the two.   But I'm thinking it will be hard to combine the stars from one into the other so that it looks seamless. 

Suggestions?  Basic guidelines?

[pfile]

Gerald has a pretty good video: http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=5384.0

rob

[joelshort]

Thanks, I'll check it out.

[jkmorse]

Also have you tried Morphological transform? After stretching, it does a great job with those pesky stars and in stretching you can reduce the problem by using a star mask during the actual stretching process. 

[joelshort]

Yeah I use MorphologicalTransformation all the time, but I find it difficult to use that with tiny stars, or maybe the problem is that it's hard to create a good star mask for those tiny stars.   I do think that the video Rob pointed too will work well in my particular situation.