Spent $130 on a light pollution filter and it mostly just made my shots dim and blue

Victor Webb · 2026-09-25T05:45:05.403987+00:00

Bought a clip-in light pollution filter for my crop sensor camera back in March, $130 shipped. Live in Columbus so my backyard sky is orange soup, and every forum post swore this thing would fix it. First night out I shot the Orion Nebula, 40 subs at 60 seconds each, and every single frame came back dim with this weird blue-green cast. Stars looked softer too. Spent two hours stacking and the result was worse than my unfiltered shots from January. Turns out my neighborhood switched to LED streetlights a couple years back, and the filter is built to cut the old sodium vapor glow, which is basically gone now. So I paid $130 to lose signal and gain a color problem. Sold it on eBay for $75, ate the loss. If your city is all LED now, save your money and drive 45 minutes out of town instead. Anyone else buy one of these and find it useless in an LED-lit area?

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Spent $130 on a light pollution filter and it mostly just made my shots dim and blue | Astronomy Photos - Rigidtalk