One of the most significant challenges of astro-photography is the problem of light pollution. Even if you’re dozens of miles away from a major metropolitan area, there’s a good chance the light pollution of orange sodium vapor city street lamps will affect the outcome of your photograph.
There are a few ways to get around this in post-production, but most of them involve adding a virtual graduated filter and adjusting the color balance to fix the problem. What if you could simply add a physical filter on your lens to fix the problem in-camera, where the data is originally gathered?
Now you can, thanks to Lonely Speck’s new PureNight Premium filter. Currently being crowdfunded on Lonely Speck’s website, the PureNight Premium filter is a light pollution reduction filter that’s meant to counteract the orange glow of city lights in your nightscape photographs.
The PureNight Premium filter is made of didymium glass, a special type of glass that’s designed to dramatically reduce the amount of yellow and orange light. By placing the filter in front of your lens, light between the 575nm and 600nm wavelengths is minimized, resulting in a much more natural-looking image without any post-production.
Each square filter is precision ground and polished and features an anti-reflective coating to reduce glare and ghosting that often occurs when capturing bright sources of light at night.
To use the filters, you’ll need a square filter holder. Lonely Speck suggests the Formatt Hitech system because of its versatility and comparably low price, but any universal filter holder should get the job done.
PureNight Premium comes in 85mm and 100mm sizes and is expected to ship in March 2017. You can pre-order a 85mm and 100mm filter on Lonely Speck’s website for $219 and $239, respectively.
Each filter comes with a protective case and includes a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee — if you aren’t happy with the filter for any reason, contact Lonely Speck and they’ll offer a replacement or refund.
