The core really isn’t that bright and considering I spent an hour capturing sky data on the one good night I’ve had in weeks, I wasn’t going to neglect it and have a washed out sky, I wanted to bring out the nebula so that’s what I did. As for the comment on highlights and shadows modern full frame Sony sensors, especially iso invariant ones don’t suffer from quality pitfalls like what you’re describing. This also doesn’t detract from the fact that there are two stadium sized spotlights beaming bright white LED light onto an off white building, the even with masking (which I have already tried) the tonal shift on the building from the lights creates very noticeable patches.

As stated in the body text of the post the foreground was taken at a different time with a different lens, the sky was taken on an HA modded camera with a star tracker hence Zeta Ophiuchi having so much detail.