About noise...

I had to attend an institute meeting last night about climate change - which was OK as it was held in the meeting room downstairs in the office building, but it finished late and I still had no blip, so I thought I would have another go at planes. It wasn't foggy (like Monday) but was drizzly, so there were still some nice effects with the aircraft lights.

On my Monday blip, buzzcocksfan mentioned that at 1600 iso the noise was low.
Let me tell you the noise was atrocious, but I have a little technique in PS Elements to get rid of heavy noise without too much degradation of the image.
Elements doesn't have any channel information, but some time ago I went to flaming pear and downloaded their freebie plug-ins. Most of their free stuff I have not found a use for, but amongst it all are 3 little gems: Gray from Blue, Gray from Red and Gray from Green. This is essentially the channel information that Elements' older brother has. Having got that, reducing noise is a piece of cake. In short you:

Create a layer for each of the channels using the above plug-ins on copies of the background. Apply the reduce noise filter to another copy of the background and place at the top of the stack. Examine the three channels for noise. Select the two with the least noise and discard the other. Blend the two channels using pin light mode, merge them. Apply the "find edges" filter, blur by two pixels, lighten with curves. Bung the result into the mask of a nil value adjustment layer, clip it to the top (noise filtered) layer and Bob's your uncle. The image degradation that you get with the noise filter is not applied to the edges. All clear now?
In the above pic, there weren't many edges to find, But on a good, well defined image, it works a treat.

I rushed the explanation above routine as I don't think anybody will be really interested, but at least I have addressed buzzcocksfan's comment.