Stuck Between Dark Skies and Heavy Light Pollution

Hi schmaks,

It makes perfect sense to avoid the most light-polluted part of the sky, at least for nebulae and galaxies (it will still work okay for star clusters). For me it's W-SW that is excluded because most of the city resides in that direction (plus a rather annoying neighboor on the apartment right across the street with a huge TV bright enough for objects in my balcony to cast shadows even with the balcony lights turned on, although admittedly they never watch after midnight).

Furthermore, all the low hanging fruit is in the southern half of the sky: Virgo, Orion, Scorpius, Sagitarius. You are lucky you live on that side of the light polluted area.

Cheers,
Dimitris

PS:  narrowband is almost immune to light pollution (manmade or moonlight) but is not the same as not having light pollution. You will not be imaging he same stuff, for starters. This is not to say you cannot produce very fascinating images, but subjects simply do not look the same as they do in broadband. Closest analogy that I can think of is a portrait of an individual vs a facial x-ray of that same individual. Admittedly not a very good analogy but you get the idea. Plus it brings in its own class of problems because it requires much longer exposures. It is not that you *can* take 5 or `10 minute subs. It's that you *must*. And you don't need longer exposures just for imaging, but also for focusing and target acquisition. Ever tried focusing when you need a `15 second exposure to see the out-of-focus stars? I just did. Can't say it was very pleasant. And the plate solving that is necessary for centering (or even just framing) targets would fail 5 times out of 6.