Reviews

Light Pollution Filter Shootout

Comparisons of crops of the Cygnus Wall

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Nico Carver
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8 Comments

  1. This is a great review and I had been racking my brain to figure out what or if I should buy a filter. I was looking at Optolong L Pro. At $200 its an expensive filter and after seeing your review and reading it here on your site, I am going for Baader. Thanks for putting in the time and effort putting all this together.

    -vijay

    Reply

  2. Great review.
    Can I ask if the images were straight out of the cameras?
    How did you achieve white balance on the 5D images?
    Cheers.

    Reply

    1. The images are not straight out of camera. They were calibrated, registered, stacked, and minimally processed. Some tech details appear in the upper right of each graphic on this page. Let me know if anything is confusing or needs further clarification.
      White balance was set to daylight on the 5D, I then used a process called Photometric Color Calibration (available in PixInsight or the free Siril program) on all samples. Photometric Color Calibration uses the colors of known stars in the photo to set white balance for the whole photo. It is much more accurate than any other method, and I think a good way of putting the filters on equal footing when it comes to color response.

      Reply

  3. Hi Nico,

    Thanks for shared your experience with astrophoto, i write from Naples with bortle 9 (heavy light pollution) and have no possibility of moving. The your shoot in city with bortle 9 could you give me more details? example iso, shutter speed, focal length etc …?

    Reply

  4. Very good review. You should also have a link to the full res unfiltered stacks so you can tab from the unfiltered to the filtered shots for comparison. Thanks.

    Reply

  5. Hi Nico!

    Thanks for all your excellent YouTube videos!

    I’m using the new great ZWO ASI2600 MC-Pro which has a UV-IR glass and even sensor. I have been wanting a good filter for galaxy’s that will diminish a bit of skyglow and reduce my (relatively minimal) light pollution allowing longer exposures. But… maybe I should just not use a filter. I have an Orion ‘SkyGlow Imaging filter’ which I think is similar to the Optolong L-Pro and have mixed results regarding star color accuracy. I just received the new IDAS LPS-D3 thinking it might be a better choice but it seems to have even less galaxy definition and details than the Orion filter and needs a bit more exposure time. Maybe it would be a good nebula filter, but?

    What I’m especially looking for is a high resistance to star halos and great star color and a neutral background.

    I suspect your wonderful LP Filter Shootout would show quite different results with different targets – especially galaxies if you ever want to do it. Resistance to star halos might vary quite a bit as well!

    Btw, the new IDAS NBZ is great on my 11″ HD with HyperStar… but also like the Baader UHC-S Nebula filter with wider Ha and Oiii bandpass although some bright star halos.

    Wish you were my neighbor!

    God Bless,
    James Goodall

    Reply

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All content and images licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, Nico Carver (Nebula Photos)