Light pollution is waging war on amateur astronomy. But don't surrender, fight back with an Orion SkyGlow broadband filter! It's an advanced multilayer "interference" filter that blocks the most common wavelengths of light pollution while passing desirable wavelengths with very little attenuation, yielding dramatically better deep-sky views.
SkyGlow filters feature improved blocking of mercury-vapor light and higher transmission at critical hydrogen-alpha and hydrogen-beta lines than competing filters, including expensive "premium" models. Bright, light-polluted skies appear much darker, and the contrast between object and sky is improved significantly.
The contrast-enhancement effect is particularly apparent when observing or photographing nebulas. Unlike stars, emission nebulas give off light in a very narrow range of wavelengths. SkyGlow broadband filters allow maximum transmission of the important wavelengths of hydrogen-alpha, hydrogen-beta and doubly ionized oxygen, the light bands most commonly emitted by nebulas. Views of galaxies and star clusters are also enhanced, although these objects don't show as dramatic an improvement as nebulas. (They emit a broad spectrum, so their brightness is reduced along with light pollution.)
An unexpected advantage of the SkyGlow filter is its improvement of planetary images, particularly of Jupiter, especially in conjunction with a color filter. Without any filters, this bright planet's cloud bands frequently appear only as faint smears. Pop in the filters, and distinct banding, knottings, and festoons appear, and the edges of Jupiter's disk stand out crisply.
