As
      I soon discovered with digitized film images take with my schmidt
      camera or wide angle lenses, there are far more stars in an image
      than is possible to display with an inkjet print with its often
      horrendous halftone dithering, or especially on my "high
      resolution" 19 inch monitor either full screen or web site
      sized especially. By using the dilation filter in Pix Insight,
      stars can be increased in size slightly without an loss of brightness
      such as a Gaussian blur would do. This allows even the faintest
      stars to be printed on such a small print as an 8x10, or viewed
      on an even lower resolution monitor image. Here is an example
      of this effect:


      
 Left: 30 second exposure,
      on ASA 100 film of Sagittarius during full moon. The stars are
      so tiny even with this 1024 wide image, that 90 percent of them
      are invisible!

      
(click on thumbnail
      for the full size image)
 

      
 Left: after Pix Insights
      dilation filter (similar to Photoshop Maximum filter) A small
      amount of star enlargement reveals the faintest stars. You don't
      want to make them huge disks - set for a very small amount of
      dilation, such that the stars are all still extremely small pinpoints.

      
(click on thumbnail
      for the full size image)


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