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Changed my mind about light pollution filters after visiting the McDonald Observatory in west Texas last month

I always thought those filters were just a gimmick for Instagram photos, but standing under that Bortle 2 sky showed me what I was missing with my city shots. Has anyone here actually used one to get decent Milky Way photos from a suburban backyard?

3 comments

3 Comments

kai81820h agoMost Upvoted

You said "standing under that Bortle 2 sky showed me what I was missing" and that really hit home. I remember one time I drove three hours out to a dark sky park with my old DSLR and a cheap clip-in filter, and I spent the whole night fighting with clouds and forgetting extra batteries. But man, what I got back was worth it. Those filters can actually cut through some of the orange glow if you're not in the worst part of the city, they're just not magic for light domes on the horizon.

val_chen1620h ago

Ended up grabbing one of those optolong L-Pro filters myself after reading about it on a forum and it actually helped a ton from my backyard which has a bad streetlight nearby. Still not as good as being out in the boonies, but it let me get some decent shots of Orion without all that orange haze ruining the details.

nancy92920h ago

Kai that is so true about filters not being magic for light domes. I tried stacking a bunch of 30 second subs with an L-Pro from my driveway which has a big sodium vapor light right next to it, and the gradient was still brutal even after all that processing. Ended up spending more time fighting the orange than actually enjoying the data. The only thing that really fixed it was just packing up and driving 45 minutes to a spot with less direct light pollution. Filters are a bandaid, not a cure.