M1 and M42 - Antlia Quad Band Filter First Results

[Roy Foreman]

A few years ago I started using Optolong's L-Enhance dual / tri band filter.  Works well but to my eyes the colour balance seems to be a biased towards cyan.  Then I started using the IDAS NB1 tri band filter.  Much more natural looking colour and, to me, seems to be a much better filter all round.

Now I've acquired Antlia's Quad band filter and the images below are the first results.  M1 was taken with a 10" Classical Cassegrain, and M42 with an Askar 107phq and 0.7x focal reducer.  Camera was a ZWO 6200 MC Pro

Colour balance in the stars seems to be a lot more neutral than the other two filters, but the overall colour in nebulae seems to be overly red - easily corrected in post processing.  Although it is quad band, and theoretically letting more light pass through than the others, it seems to produce dimmer images. This, of course is very subjective, unless you do side by side images, which I have not done.

These are not world class images, just test shots to see how the filter performs.

Hope they prove to be a helpful guide to those considering this filter.

 

 

[Sp@ce_d]

Interesting as I’ve just started looking at these “multiband” type filters. I noticed this one recommends not to use on a camera with IR block which you don’t have on your 6200 but I do on my 2600 so I was considering the optolong quad version. I see what you mean by dimmer, I didn’t notice that on examples I saw on utube for the optolong quad one. I’ve been using an Idaz nbz for dual on OSC which I’m happy with for NB. However with my skies changing from bortle 3 to bortle 5 over the years a cleaner OSC would be nice. 

[Roy Foreman]

12 minutes ago, Sp@ce_d said:

Interesting as I’ve just started looking at these “multiband” type filters. I noticed this one recommends not to use on a camera with IR block which you don’t have on your 6200 but I do on my 2600 so I was considering the optolong quad version. I see what you mean by dimmer, I didn’t notice that on examples I saw on utube for the optolong quad one. I’ve been using an Idaz nbz for dual on OSC which I’m happy with for NB. However with my skies changing from bortle 3 to bortle 5 over the years a cleaner OSC would be nice. 

It's not that you can't use with IR block, just that you will miss out on some of the signal, which may not be a bad thing , especially with refractor, as not all are corrected for IR.

Certainly these multi band filters help with imaging things like galaxies in light polluted skies that we are all having to contend with these days

 

[Sp@ce_d]

5 minutes ago, Roy Foreman said:

It's not that you can't use with IR block, just that you will miss out on some of the signal, which may not be a bad thing , especially with refractor, as not all are corrected for IR.

Certainly these multi band filters help with imaging things like galaxies in light polluted skies that we are all having to contend with these days

 

Have you done any (aggressive?) checks for halos? One reason I’ve never tried optolong having seen earlier ones not handle them too well. I moved from astrodon to antlia on my mono setup a while back which I was happy with so antlia would be my preference. 

[Roy Foreman]

11 minutes ago, Sp@ce_d said:

Have you done any (aggressive?) checks for halos? One reason I’ve never tried optolong having seen earlier ones not handle them too well. I moved from astrodon to antlia on my mono setup a while back which I was happy with so antlia would be my preference. 

I haven't done any specific testing, but I have noticed that the optolong does tend to suffer from halos and other spurious effects more so than the IDAS. My Antlia filter is relatively new so no ling term data, but so far it has given me clean results, apart from its tenancy to be over red.