What filter should I get? I want to photograph Reflection Nebulae and Galaxies with my OSC camera from a lightpolluted place. looing for a L-enhance for broader band tragets - Forums

Topic starter

May 30, 2024

I'm currently photographing with my 2600mc pro and WO zenithstar 61 with 360mm and an L-enhance Filter which makes suuch a huge difference.
Right now I'm rebuilding a old newt with a 1000mm and want to get more into Galaxies and found myself photographing Reflection Nebulae as well.
Right now I have to wait until 1 am so that the streetlights turn off and the lightpollution is gone but is there a Filter that would allow me to photograph broader band targets from lightpollution like the L-enhance as well? I've heard of the Tri an Quad band filters but I'm not sure if they would do the job and I feel like the light pollution filters would be to weak since I've go a bunch of LED lights around me.

Do you guys have any experiences with that? I'm sure I'm not the only one

andrea tasselli

Frequent contributor

May 30, 2024

Short answer: No. Longer answer: There are a number of LPR filters that do filter a significant part of the spectrum so you might select the one that best fits your LP situation.

Marc-Antonio Fischer

May 30, 2024

I am living on a B6/7 sky depending in what direction I look. I can tell you, you better use no filters at all. These light pollution filters are allway cutting out the natural yellow light in galaxies and reflection nebulae. The image looses a lot of depth and the colors look odd. Trust me Ive tried a lot and the best result was without any filter. (Uv\IR) allowed ofc)

Tommi Liinalampi

May 30, 2024

Always think what is the source of light. If the source is stars (like in case of Reflection nebulae and galaxies), you can't take just narrow piece of spectrum (like in case of Emission nebulae) and filter rest. Light pollution filters can help very little in cases when photographing blue reflection nebulae. But as mentioned before you may loose yellow tones in case of galaxies.

Massimo Di Fusco

May 30, 2024

Hi,
I shoot under a light polluted sky (Bortle 7/8) with an OSC and I use for galaxy and reflection nebulae both CLS and L-QEF filter.
They are very similar filters with regards to the light-cut but, actually, I prefer L-QEF because CLS suffer for halos with red stars. However, the difference in price is very big, so I recommend you CLS to try at first.

Helpful Concise

Markus Selbach

May 30, 2024

to wait until 1 am so that the streetlights turn off and the lightpollution is gone

Luckey you! I wish they would do it like this here too 😉

Antlia Triband works very good for me. Of course you are cutting away lot of wavelengths but the ratios between the interesting wavelengths gets improved. A nice side effect is that the stars stay smaller and will be less dominant.