Image processing - or not

It was, of course, cloudy last night. No chance to try out the new mount properly. So we had a little play, and watched the scope follow the sky tour as it did a little jig backwards and forwards, actually more like forwards and forwards, for some reason the scope won't move in the other direction for the slew. Still, after another guess align it seemed to be mostly pointing in the right sort of places. It's a little irritating that whilst it will quite happily remember the location coordinates properly, it won't keep the date and time updated. It remembers what they were when the mount was powered off, so something is storing it, but the clock is stopped. Ah well, it's not too much of a pain to put them in each time, but it's something that could easily have been solved with a watch battery in the handset. I don't suppose I should complain considering how little I paid for it.

I spent several hours last night trying to re process the Leo image I took the other night.I ran through the Level and Curves, tweaked, retweaked, a little more a little less, up the blue and green, drop the red try and balance the colours. Oops, messed that one up, start again. This went on for a while. Then I tried working my way through the next steps in the SGL tutorial on image processing, which is to create a star layer.

Well, I started off fine, applied the dust and scratches tool, duplicated the layer, did the difference setting and pop, there was all the stars. Now to select them. I hunted high and low for the select by colour. Nowhere to be found. I started selecting each one by hand. After about 20 or so, Elements decided that as I was selecting so many, obviously I wanted to select the entire picture. No I don't think so. I tried all the different selection options. No go. I reverted and started again. This went on for quite some time.

In the end, none the wiser, unable to find any information in Elements help, on google or anywhere else about how to do this select, I succumbed to frustration. Closed Elements, not saving anything and shutdown the computer. Image processing was easier when I knew less about what I was doing and just applied some of the NC tools. This is tougher than finding dim and dark things in the night sky.

Typically, as I won't be able to get out with the new mount tonight, the clouds are beginning to clear. Still, I shall take the bins and a tripod on the off chance the opportunity may arise. If it does, I can share a few wonders with a group, which will be good, and demonstrate that there's a lot more up there than at first meets the eye.