A star suppression example

An animated image of the star and starless versions of the "Wizard Nebula"

I often use a starless image in one of the processing steps of the astronomical image.

Sometimes I publish the starless version too, it looks kind of nice, or spooky, that's a matter of taste.

If there is a dense star-field, nebula itself could be hard to detect. When stars are suppressed, the nebula can be seen better due the fact, that human brains tend to form false shapes from the cloud of dots.

Here is an example of my "Tone Mapping" technique: 

http://astroanarchy.blogspot.com/2009/11/power-of-tone-mapping.html

A PDF-tutorial can be found behind this link:

http://astroanarchy.blogspot.com/2009/04/neaic.html