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That is not what starnet does. It just removes the star from the picture you took, nothing else. It also predates generative AI by a few years.

If by "not real", you mean "you removed the stars so it no longer reflect reality!", then real photograph doesn't exist. For example, OP uses narrow-band filters, and it's common to map H-alpha wavelength, which is red, to green in the images. Does that make it unreal?

In the end, astrophotography is more art than science; the goal is more about producing aesthetically-pleasing images than doing photometry. Photographers must take some artistic license.

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https://astrobackyard.com/starnet-astrophotography/

“StarNet is a neural network that can remove stars from images in one simple step leaving only the background. More technically, it is a convolutional residual net with encoder-decoder architecture and with L1, Adversarial and Perceptual losses.”

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Your citation is a valid copy-paste from the website linked, but you haven't yet replied to the assertions of the parent comment. Could you, in your own words rather than someone else's, speak more about your concerns and address those assertions?
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They're a lot more real than CG/AI. It's very rare and maybe not even possible to have a "true" astrophotography photo. At those light levels, eyes and camera sensors work very differently and even a "plain" astro photo has either been processed a lot, or else doesn't look like what our eyes would see.
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>> They're a lot more real than CG/AI.

Fine, but is still art photography with heavy processing. Not to criticize the amazing work of Rod Prazeres, who has now commented on this thread.

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Even straight-out-of-the-camera JPG files have been heavily processed - they are just hidden behind the RAW processor which we have taken for granted; not to mention smartphone photographs, which employ neural network in the processing pipeline.
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