That advice about stacking filters cost me 2 hours of clear sky

Last month someone on here told me to skip the light pollution filter and just shoot unfiltered from my backyard in Phoenix. I listened, and my Orion nebula shots came out with this awful orange gradient that took forever to clean up. Then I tried their second suggestion, which was to just stretch the raw data harder, and that made the noise way worse. So I went back to my old Astronomik CLS filter, and the next night the same target looked 10 times better with barely any post work. I think the person meant well, but they clearly never shot from a city with that much sodium vapor. Has anyone else had a popular filter trick fail hard once you actually tried it on Bortle 8 skies?

1 comments

1 Comment

ninas6714h ago

Feel you on this one, city skies are a whole different beast than what a lot of folks assume. That orange glow just eats every bit of faint detail unless you got something on the front of the scope. Glad you found what works, sometimes the old gear wins for a reason.