Harmy said:

OK, to the stars - they stay this bright. This is not a whim of mine or anything, it's based on hard evidence that some of you may have seen. All evidence points towards the stars being this bright in the original; even the GOUT stars are this bright, only the faded levels make them kind of greyish but they are this big.

The 70mm scans also support the bright starfields. See this thread. (Interestingly, when you compare that shot on imageshack to the same one on jedi1.net, I see a slight levels difference.)