Excellent! Thank you. Yes the exposure time was much too high in ekos. It was at 0.1 seconds. Once I matched AutoStar's setting of 0.002 I get almost exactly the same image. The autostar interface is somewhat opaque, but I didn't find any toggleable processing settings that affected the image. What is auto stretch (in ekos) supposed to do? When I enable it, it significantly darkens the image, but doesn't really improve the clarity.
Thanks again,
Eric

When dealing with astro cameras, they produce 16 bit images. Displays are 8 bits in depth, so, the stretch is how you map 16 bit data onto an 8 bit display, just controls the conversion function. If you just do a dump 16-> shrink, with astro images in particular, you just end up with a black screen, because all of the detail is in the dim stuff, but there's usually some few bright spots that really skew things.