Thanks Alex, Leon, Les and Mick
Dropping the stars was a long story that became a short one.
I took some 5hrs with a continuum filter, its a few Nm off the Ha band so you only get stars (no neb).
I tried to use it to subtract stars, but it doesnt work very well, I cant find anywhere on the net how to use it. As its 3nm, you have to push it like hell, and it still doesnt show as many stars as a colour filter. I gave up.
So, I colour select the stars on a colour sub (nice and big and lots of them), deselect the neb caught in the selection, lasso odd remaining stars painfully time consuming, modify>expand by 6, feather by 4 (then save the selection) and then hammer the selected stars to oblivion with the minimise filter (sometimes in 2 stages, modify>contact by 3 and minimise again).
Heal out giant stars and the artifacts they left.
Sharpening and hi pass masks then become a doddle to use, because theres no star artifacts to worry about. I pulled out more surrounding detail than some who really know what they are doing
.
I thought to myself, this is cheating, but I dont pretend to be accurate, and then, well, most of the stars in any image show forground stars that are not in the subject, so perhaps this is a more accurrate view if you were standing in front of it
.