wendysanchez•21d agoProlific Poster

Overheard an astrophotographer at a star party saying light pollution filters are mostly a scam

I was at a dark sky site near Tucson last Saturday and overheard this guy telling a beginner that light pollution filters don't actually fix the real problem, they just cut out certain wavelengths. He said he wasted $300 on a fancy broadband filter before realizing his images would never look good from his backyard in the city. It made me think about all the posts I see recommending filters as a quick fix. Has anyone else tested a filter against just driving an hour to darker skies and compared the results?

3 comments

3 Comments

beth_reed21d ago

My buddy Tom spent months stacking $400 worth of filters on his telescope only to drive two hours to a Bortle 3 site one weekend and get shots that made his city work look like garbage. He said the filters helped a tiny bit with orange streetlights but did almost nothing for the blur and noise from light pollution bleeding into every frame. Now he just packs up his gear for dark trips and laughs at the filter ads he used to believe.

faith_king21d ago

Filters are a total scam for astrophotography unless you're shooting narrowband from a dark site. I wasted like $200 on a dual-band filter because everyone online swore it was magic. Took it out to my backyard in the suburbs and the results were still grainy and washed out. Finally drove an hour to a Bortle 2 zone with just a stock camera and lens, no filters, and got better images in one night than I did in a month of backyard attempts. Now I just save the gas money and only shoot from dark spots. Filters help a tiny bit with specific streetlight colors but they don't fix the real problem which is skyglow drowning out your signal.

ray13620d ago

Filters are a total scam for astrophotography" - I gotta push back on that hard, man. You're comparing a $200 dual-band filter to driving hours to a dark site, but that's not a fair test. A good filter is meant to work WITH your setup, not replace a dark sky. I use a simple $80 CLS clip-in filter from my backyard in the suburbs with sodium streetlights all around, and it cuts the orange glow way down. I get clean 30 second subs at f/2.8 that stack nicely into Andromeda or the Orion Nebula without completely blowing out the background. Yeah, a dark site is always going to beat city shooting, but I can't drive out every clear night. That filter lets me get decent practice shots on weeknights when I'd otherwise get nothing but mud.