Anybody Imaging Under the Canopy of Red Tower Lights?

I don't know for sure, but I would be surprised if flashing red lights 1 km away would create a major problem for your overall light pollution situation, unless those towers would be located high enough to be in front of your targets. What cardinal direction are they going to be located in? Red light in general doesn't impact imaging nearly as much as white LED lights, and I'm imaging next to two LED street lights. Broadband is still quite possible under Bortle 7 skies, so even if they raised your LP situation to Bortle 6 (very doubtful), you'd still have a far better situation than many of us have. If I were in your situation, I'd definitely be annoyed, but I don't think I'd be worried.

Ouch - okay, then I would be a little worried about southern targets. This might be difficult to gauge at this moment, but how high in degrees would that be roughly? The reason I'm asking is that if that's only 20-25° high, it shouldn't make too much of an impact, as I find imaging targets below about 35° is usually too much atmosphere to shoot through anyway to get a decent result and shooting 10° higher *should* be enough distance (fingers crossed?). I was also imagining that the intensity would be similar to radio towers we have around here, which is extremely weak. I've also imaged a few times within a few km of a smattering of wind turbines and they haven't had any impact, but that's not a wind farm by any means.

I doubt they themselves would create a great deal of atmospheric turbulence - any turbulence would already be there from the wind present, right?

Right, but they're not doing the blowing, they're being blown by the wind already there. They move, but since they're not producing the wind, I'd imagine they'd act more like stationary buildings than giant fans. That's not to say they wouldn't have any impact. Walk downtown any city surrounded by skyscrapers and you'll definitely feel that wind vortex… But I think (hope?) the impact in that regard wouldn't be too drastic.

We are just north of a wind farm on Amherst Island, Ontario – there are three less than 800 meters away from my observatory.  If I attempt to image anything below 20 degrees there is the possibility that the blades will leave a smear on my images. Its an interesting effect… another wasted evening. They have recently turned on the tower flashers – so two sets of bright LEDs on each tower, plus the flashing beacons on the nacelle.  And two doors to the east we have a neighbor who uses an airport light to mark their driveway.  I image with a 6" RC and a 61mm refractor with a very deep shade.  As long as I am a few degrees above any of these light sources or between them it doesn't seem to hurt much. Any local backscatter just adds to the background gradient that I clean up with PixInsight. We do get ground fogs and these sources of scatter combined with all the lights just shut my imaging down.  Dew is usually pretty heavy then as well. I have been using OSC and am just dipping my toe into narrowband.  Night sky SQM runs between a moonlit low of 19 and a much better 21 otherwise. I tend to work south and east – there is a brightly lit cement plant and gas plant under construction to the west (the white city..) and the light dome of Kingston, ON is to the northeast. Comparing what I get locally with my iTelescope images – allowing for the equipment differences they do not seem that different. Locally, clouds are a much larger problem.

greg latiak

I am imaging between two wind farms, also under a sky of between bortle 4 and 5. One wind farm is located in a distance of about 1,5 miles, the other one is around 3 miles away. During the last year, both were doubled in size from around 10 to 20 big fans each. I can't really distinguish the influence of that from the overall light pollution situation. According to what I read, LP is annually increasing between 3 and 6 percent in Germany. Light pollution maps do illustrate that in a pretty scary way. But from the practical side I can say that four years ago my possibilities were limited when it came to separating dark dust nebulae from the background sky - and that hasn't changed noticably since the wind farms were enlarged.
CS (and DS)
Basti