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Update: I blew $410 on a light pollution filter and it made my city shots worse, save your money
I shoot from my balcony in Chicago and thought a filter would fix the orange glow, so I grabbed one for $410 after watching a YouTube review that promised cleaner nebula pics. Shot the same targets for 3 weeks with and without it, and honestly the unfiltered frames stacked better in DeepSkyStacker every single time. The filter just ate the signal and added weird green halos around bright stars, which took me forever to figure out. Anyone here actually getting good results with these things, or did I just buy the wrong one? Wondering if I should return it or keep it for a dark site trip this fall.
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angela_morgan8h ago
Did you check whether your filter is cutting into the near infrared at all? That sounds odd, but here is why I ask. Most light pollution filters pass a big chunk of deep red and near IR, and a lot of cheaper CMOS cameras are still fairly sensitive out there. So you end up stacking frames where the stars are bloated and the color is shifted, which can hurt your results even if the filter is doing its job on the orange glow. The green halos you saw are a dead giveaway that it is a poorly made interference filter, since cheap ones shift the passband when light comes in at an angle. If the glass is not well made, the edge of the frame gets a totally different color than the center. For the fall trip, I would test it on one target at a truly dark site and compare, because that is the only place it might help. If it still adds halos there, send it back.
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