Originally posted by texandrews Really impressive shot. I'm fascinated that the stars in the lake on occasion show up better than the ones in the sky...
This is caused by having lenses that are too perfect!
As an object in a scene, a star is a perfect pinpoint of light. A high-quality lens can readily image a star as single or a couple of pixels. If the exposure setting is picked to bring out the fainter stars of the sky and milky way, the brightest stars will saturate the pixels and clip. All the bright stars will be the same 100% brightness which means the image loses some of the sense of constellations of varing-brightness stars against a dim star backdrop. (Post processing to bring up the dimmer sky features exacerbates this, too.)
In contrast, the reflected star will inevitably be a bit blurred by micro-motions of the water, cover several pixels of the sensor, and thus register as a range of brighter-bigger and dimmer-smaller features.
(Note: the Kepler space telescope --
SPEX - About Kepler -- intentionally defocused its image to avoid these effects and collect better data.)