Just bought an Orion Ultrablock (narrowband).

[gobes]

Anyway... wanted to give a test run last night - bit visibility was extremely poor. There seemed to be a slight fog in the air - which was reflecting the street lamps all over the place. Combined with the moon being up high - I didn't really stand a chance!

Anybody else use the Orion Ultrablock? If so - how much of a difference should I expect to see?

[stefski]

Hi Gobes,

This will hugely darken the background sky, but also quite a lot of other things as well...Forgive give me if you know all this already but....The ultrablock will be really good for most nebulae (but you may lose a little of the faint wisps of some extended nebulae) especially planetaries. It's not good for galaxies or clusters as it will block too much light and make these objects much dimmer, if not invisible.

The ultrablock was one of the first lpr filters I bought ages ago....What I used to do, when sketching, was to look at the star field where the object was, then put on the ultrablock.....The stars mostly disappeared, but faint nebulae would pop into view!

In short, you'll see a huge difference!

Stef

[Doc]

What scope do you have as I was always to believe that these UHC filters as Stef has said block out a lot of light and are best suited for larger aperture scopes that gather a lot of light.

[gobes]

I'm using a Skymax 127.

[stefski]

Hi gobes,

When I had the ultrablock, I had a nexstar 130gt, very similar to your skymax!!! You should have enough aperture...

Stef

[gobes]

Nice one... thanks all.