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My buddy swore a red filter would fix my nebula photos
My friend Dave, who shoots astro on a $200 telescope, told me to tape a red gel filter over my lens to cut light pollution. I tried it on Orion last week and all I got were weird pink stars and a blurry mess. Has anyone else gotten bad photo advice from a know-it-all friend?
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adam_robinson2d ago
@harper_owens yeah that's the way to go. My buddy Tom tried the same cheap gels idea a few years back on the Orion Nebula and ended up with stars that looked like pink cotton balls. He switched to one of those screw-in light pollution filters and it was night and day difference. The gels just don't have the right coating or whatever to handle the spectrum right.
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harper_owens2d ago
Swapped out the red filter for a cheap clip-in light pollution filter from Amazon, the kind that screws into the back of your camera lens. It fixed the pink splotches and brought the nebula contrast back to life. Also learned to dial down the exposure time by about half when using any kind of filter, keeps the stars from turning into weird blobs.
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