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Beautiful image Philip!
As you can see, the more stretched image shows better detail in darker areas but burns out the bright regions to white. There's a couple of ways to address this. It's much like processing an image of the Orion nebula where there is extreme contrast between shadow and highlights.
In Photoshop, or your favourite processing program, the most popular way is to mask out the bright core while stretching the rest of the pic. There's lots of ways of doing that, but I just lasso the bright area, feather the edges of the selection so that it's not a hard line, invert the selection and stretch the rest. You may need to do this a couple of times as regions reach white point.
Another way is to only expose long enough to stop short of white point clipping, eg stop just before the white burns out in initial exposure with shorter subs. In processing, instead of doing a linear stretch, use a midtone stretch. The downside to this method is that it can lack the "punch" of a linear stretch. Or you can use a combination of both.
Selections, layers, masks all help make the most of an image.
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