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That $130 light pollution filter I bought for my backyard setup in Denver does almost nothing
I got talked into it at a shop in Boulder and after 6 nights of shooting the Orion Nebula from my driveway the difference was maybe 2 percent. Save your cash and drive an hour west to the mountains instead. Has anyone found a filter that truly helps in a city, or is it all just marketing?
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ray_king5d ago
Disagree on filters being useless, but it depends which one you got. That $130 sounds like a broadband light pollution filter, and yeah those barely do anything for emission nebulae. A narrowband or dual band filter is a totally different story. I shoot from Aurora with an Optolong L-eNhance and on Orion and the Rosette the difference is not 2 percent, it's night and day, the sky background goes almost black and the nebula pops. Thing is they only work on emission targets, so on galaxies or clusters they do nothing and can even hurt. The broadband ones are mostly marketing, the narrowband ones are real. So you're half right, just make sure you're not writing off the whole category.
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