PureNight Premium filter helps astrophotographers beat light pollution
Dec 15, 2016
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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When you decide to photograph night sky, the first problem you’ll encounter is most likely to be light pollution. If you live in a city, not only you can’t photograph the stars, but you can barely see them in the night sky. Only when you move outside the city, you can get a clear view of the starry sky. However, light pollution still leaves its mark on your photos by giving them unnatural orange-yellow tint. So, Lonely Speck has created PureNight Premium, a filter that will help you fight this problem.
Norman and Diana Southern, a couple of astrophotographers, have created a filter which reduces the glow of sodium vapor city lights. It’s made of didymium glass, square-shaped, and it comes in two sizes: 85mm and 100 mm. It’s mounted onto your lens by using a standard square filter holder.
Using PureNight Premium reduces the haze and orange-yellow tint from the street lights, and improves colors and contrast in your images. This gives you better overall quality of the photos, but also reduces post-production time.
Lonely Speck has launched PureNight as a crowdfunded project, and you can learn more about it and about the product itself on their website. Both models are available for pre-order and the estimated shipment date is in March 2017.
I wish I’ve had these when I tried photographing stars from a mountain right above my city. What do you think? Will you buy one?
[Via SLR Lounge | Lonely Speck]
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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8 responses to “PureNight Premium filter helps astrophotographers beat light pollution”
Light is light is light, the same amount of light in each picture, its just the colour cast that is removed, not the polluted light. Am I right?
Interesting idea but ultimately it seems to me we are talking about losing a stop of light for a glass white balance adjustment vs an in camera or post white balance adjustment. I’ll stick to no filter.
I may not be up to snuff, with my physics, but isn’t this just a polarizing filter? :/
As you know white light is basically the mix of all colours. Every colour is one wavelength. (I know it’s oversimplified). To modify the colours, you can use filters, that cut out certain wavelengths this way change the colour balance.
The lucky thing is that the sodium vapour lights (big orange-yellow colour street lights) are not a mix of colours as the common lightbulb. They emit a light at a very specific wavelength only. So if you have a very specific filter that lets through anything but the sodium vapour’s colour (575-600 nm), then you will see everything but this light. On the link there is a chart with the transmittance. It shows that the filter lets through roughly 95% of any colour but only 20% of the street light. Although there is a cut in green and blue as well.
No, it is not a polariser.
So as I said, light pollution is extra light that spoils the dark black clear night sky so that the light from stars is less prominent, this filter does not get rid of the light pollution as the title makes out, so its just changing the WB.
No. The filter is a band-rejection (or “band-stop”) filter that specifically blocks the major emission band of sodium vapor lights. Since light at this frequency is a significant portion of (in many places the primary source of) light pollution, the filter will reduce light pollution in photos.
There is no significant effect on color temperature.
Only changing the WB could be done in post. You can see the real difference on the last two photos. Look at the town, not only the sky. You can see a very significant difference there.
Couldn’t you flip a .9 GND filter and get similar results?