Here's some preliminary data I acquired last night between between 3 contrast enhancing/light pollution suppression filters on the Rosette Nebula - click on the revisions and make 3 tabs:
(note these are not fully processed finals nor are they meant to be)
I used SharpCap 3.1 to perform a 30 minute live stack (kept short on purpose because I didn't want the angular position of the Rosette to play a bigger contribution to the comparison) and shot: 1) Optolong UHC 2) Optolong CLS-CCD 3) Optolong L-PRO. An Optolong UV/IR filter was in front of all three aformentioned filters further down the optical train (the Esprit refractors have an awesome filter thread hidden away inside their flattener adapter).
The aim of this test was to see if I can shoot with a nearby 70% waning gibbous moon. The idea is that we don't do so much astrophotography unless there is a dark sky/new moon period, but I don't like wasting clear skies, so I decided to see how well these filters can help with the nearby moon.
Please let me know your thoughts/comments/questions, but I think out of the three, the UHC wins for me (more contrast between nebulosity and background and surprisingly more colour) and deems it worthwhile for shooting with such a moon up. Perhaps the more open transmission CLS-CCD will do better job with a smaller moon letting in more wavelengths of light and then the L-PRO would definetely do better with just skyglow/light pollution and no moon.
All three images were simply autostretched (unlinked), slightly colour balanced (no calibration) and saturated in Pixinsight, no further processing done. Perhaps with longer exposures and longer integration we could tease out a lot more differences, as they are not so easy to spot, so consider this a quick and dirty comparison
#win_qhy183m
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