Machu Picchu star shots: real sky or cleaned up too much?

I was in Peru last month and shot the Milky Way over the ruins. The raw frames had crazy light pollution from Aguas Calientes below, so I did gradient removal and stacked 14 exposures. Now some people are saying my final image is too processed, that it doesn't look like what your eye saw. But no single exposure captured the detail either, so where's the line between bringing out data and faking the scene? Have any of you run into this on famous landmarks, and do you disclose how much you edit before posting?

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kelly_roberts1d ago

People get way too hung up on this. You stacked 14 frames and pulled out the gradient, that's pretty standard astro work. Nobody posts a single raw file and calls it done, and nobody's eye sees the Milky Way like that anyway.