I’m not sure if I have shared this before but I currently take pictures from my drive way. Apart from the limited FOV, only the south eastern, north eastern are visible making it a bit challenging to get images for objects more than a couple of hours a night. On top of that, there is a bright street light right next to my drive way 😐 . The light also shines right into one of the guest bedroom. To mitigate the problem, I contacted the light company and explained the situation. The were kind enough to put up a shield on one side of the light. While helpful, it is not completely opaque allowing enough light to pass through so as to be a problem.
This is usually not a huge challenge when I take pictures of objects in the south eastern skies. However, at this time of the year not many targets are visible in that region of the sky during the early part of the night. So I had to resort to targeting objects in the north/northeastern skies. The lamp created so terrible LP artifacts that the subs were unusable. I had a cheap light pollution filter applied but it wasn’t any use either. Here are a couple of sample pictures I tried to take. The first one is a 5 minute sub of Elephant’s trunk nebula (not sure if you can make out the faint outline at the center of the image) and the second is 3 minute sub of Iris Nebula. As you can see, both the images have the light pollution artifact ruining the right side of the image. The more subs I stack the more apparent the problem becomes. Going back to my point about PNW not getting enough clear sky nights, I did not want the night to be ruined. Especially, as I was able to achieve pretty good focus and guiding.
So, I resorted to a very crude but effective way to get rid of light pollution (within limits) as long as the object was not in close proximity of the street light. My solution was to quickly put up a flattened cardboard box at the end of the OTA using an elastic band. Here is what the set up looked like 🙂
The crude and quick fix saved the night. I don’t care how it looks! It worked!! You can see the results for yourself to judge. However, I think I need to improve on my light pollution filter and create a v2 that is a bit more “sophisticated” 🙂 (black chart paper which encircles the entire OTA). Will keep you posted on how that goes
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