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I note that you do not provide either the Neodymium Filter nor the IR-Pass Filter in a version that is 'Square 50 x 50mm unmounted', is this correct?
In relation to both Filters' Wavelength Spectrum Response what alternative Filter(s) do you have that has the nearest spectrum response in the 50 x 50mm unmounted version? Preferably 3mm thickness.
The reason for this enquiry is to have a useful 'Luminesence' filter for Lunar and Planetary Astrophotography when the rest of the filters are for Deep Sky Imaging (Baader CCD Complete Filter Set II 50 x 50mm #2459544).
In relation to both Filters' Wavelength Spectrum Response what alternative Filter(s) do you have that has the nearest spectrum response in the 50 x 50mm unmounted version? Preferably 3mm thickness.
The reason for this enquiry is to have a useful 'Luminesence' filter for Lunar and Planetary Astrophotography when the rest of the filters are for Deep Sky Imaging (Baader CCD Complete Filter Set II 50 x 50mm #2459544).
Question by: Keith on Mar 6, 2017 9:34:00 AM | 1 Answer(s)
Hi I have a Canon 5D modified with the stock IR filter removed making it full spectrum imager. I need a standard 2" threaded IR cut filter to block the unwanted IR while leaving the Ha intact, I could purchase your Baader UV-IR-CUT Filter for this purpose but wonder if the Moon and sky-glow filter would serve dual duty to cut the unwanted IR while also preforming as a LPF with the additional benefit of lunar and Planetary enhancement. Lastly would the Moon and Sky Glow filter degrade deep sky imaging at dark sky locations thus making a case for the need of both filters?
Question by: Robert Babb on Jul 3, 2017 4:49:00 PM | 1 Answer(s)
I have a unmodified Canon 60D for astrophotography. I image from a light polluted backyard and was looking for a light pollution filter to use. Would you recommend this or another filter for that purpose? I will be upgrading to a cooled mono CMOS camera in the near future and want the capability of a 2inch filter for both the CMOS and DSLR.
Question by: Michael on Dec 30, 2018 11:30:00 PM | 1 Answer(s)
Waqas already asked similar but few years have passed. I've noticed you have a kind of universal adapter. Basically I want to use this filter with as many lenses I can. But you've stated the thread here is a telescope thread. How should I go about using the filter with my camera lenses? I have step up and down rings from the 80s to the 40s in mm but i suspect they're useless for this thread.
Question by: Am on Jan 4, 2020 1:54:00 PM | 1 Answer(s)
Can I get a Baader Neodymium (Moon & Skyglow) Filter to work with a Canon 5D camera or a Canon 77mm/82mm diameter lens; rather than with a telescope? I want to minimize noise pollution when photographing night sky, stars, and Milky Way
Question by: Andrew on Aug 31, 2019 4:18:00 PM | 1 Answer(s)
I purchased the Neodymium filter and I'm trying to attach it to a Vixen HR 3.4mm eyepiece but the thread inside the eyepiece is recessed enough that the filter thread doesn't reach it being low profile. Do you know of a solution?
Question by: Alfonso Caschili on Oct 5, 2020 11:13:00 PM | 1 Answer(s)
Is there a newer version of the Baader Neodymium filter? I purchased one from a vendor in the US and it was only 1mm thick and did not properly fit the FCCT filter slider which accepts 47.4mm filters. Even if it is only 1mm thick, that is fine that but is there a newer version that works with the FCCT filter slider? Thanks!
David Huff
David Huff
Question by: David Huff on Jan 15, 2023 2:54:00 PM | 1 Answer(s)
- Description
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Details
1¼" and 2" Neodymium Lunar & Skyglow Filter
With integrated IR blocker and Phantom Group Coating
1¼" and 2" Neodymium Lunar & Skyglow FilterDrastic contrast enhancement for all telescopes, without loss of image brightness! This filter is initially based on a development by Carl Zeiss. The effect of the element neodymium as filter material is very impressive. If used as co-mixture to optical glass, it improves the contrast and enhances the red portions of the image (especially for Mars and Jupiter). At night it blocks that part of the spectrum, which suffers most from street lighting – and it blocks the light pollution, also known as „skyglow“. And lastly, the applied UV/IR blocking coating (Luminance-coating - check the spectral trace) cuts all unwanted UV below 400 nm and NIR above 700 nm - this makes it the „sharpest contrast enhancing filter“ for imaging.
Compare with the moon & Skyglow filter before the naked eye, to test the effectiveness. Red and blue colours are extensively strengthened. If you cannot see the GRS (Great Red Spot) due to pollution try this which will allow you to see it.
In order to establish a precise plan area and to maintain the planarity despite the applied forces through the different layers of coating, a high technical effort is necessary. You have to choose from a large amount of raw glass only the best pieces in tension-free annealed quality to even hope for a good final quality may. All too easily, the glass deforms with improper preparation or coating on older evaporation systems. The final product is almost useless, if not greatest of care is taken at every stage of production.
Surface details on Mars, Jupiter and Moon as well as many deep-sky-objects become much more prominent.
- Selective contrast filter, especially suitable for all reflector telescopes
- Filters out specific wavelengths, especially those caused by streetlight and most importantly their scattered light which lightens up the night sky
- Selective blocking retains natural colours intact but with RGB significantly enhanced, differences in colour and brightness persist.
- 95% transmission in the selected spectral range.
- Fits all standard filter threads and can be combined with other filters – e.g. the planeoptically
polished (!) Baader planetary colour filters. This way, you can see fine details better or combine several images with a monochrome camera to achieve colour images. - The filter is at the same time optimised for Astrophotography due to it‘s full UV/IR-blocking coating. When used with DSLRs, stars will remain much tighter, because the unfocussed UV and IR parts of the spectrum are blocked out.
- Planeoptically polished; can be used without problems in front of a binoviewer or for afocal photography – far away from the focus without loosing sharpness!
- The fine-optical polish and absence of wedge error in the glass ensure perfect sharpness when magnifying more than 200x - while the much cheaper “fire -polished” filter glasses destroy the optical wavefront at high mags
- Neodymium doped optical glass
- Coatings Front/Back: 7-layer hard-BBAR-coating / 27-layered dielectrical UV/IR-cut coating
- Ultra-hard and durable Ion-beam hardened coatings – may be cleaned anytime without fear
Spectral Curve of the Moon & Skyglow Filter
Spectral curve of the Moon & Skyglow filterThe adjacent graph shows you the spectral curve of our Neodymium Moon & Skyglow filters. On the horizontal axis, the wavelength in nanometers, and the vertical axis is the transmission amount (opacity) specified in percent.
The area under the curve is the spectral range that can pass through the filter.
Important note: Before you buy a "Moon and Skyglow" filter, which is now available from several manufacturers, compare the transmission curves! You will find that the original "Baader Moon&Skyglow" filter has the highest transmission and is blocked in the UV/IR, with the same layer system as a Baader L filter. This means sharper images because only the spectral range where the telescope can deliver a sharp image, reaches the chip. In addition, our filter is plano-optically polished. Only few manufacturers are willing to do this, only because of this the filter is also suitable for the highest magnifications.
The Baader-UFC (Universal Filter Changer) is what you need for „quick-draw“ exchange of filters during imaging and visual observation alike. A myriad of adapters will fit the filter-changer onto almost any telescope. So the core product must never be changed. Just buy another adapter ring when moving on to another camera or telescope.
The filterholder that adapts to your needs!More Information: www.baader-planetarium.com/en/ufc
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HALOS – viewed without prejudice
The moment you insert any type of filter into the optical setup, which consists of your specific camera, the appropriate flattener/reducer or coma corrector and the telescope, the filter becomes part of this unique optical system. And every optical system is different because many products from different manufacturers are involved. All optical surfaces interact with each other in some way. One possibility is that coatings of the camera reflect unwanted light back into the telescope and onto all optical elements in front of the filter. If there is no other optical surface that will reflect the light back to the filter a second time, then it is perfect. There are no halos other than residual halos or scattering, which are unavoidable, depending on the filter design. That's what we mean by our slogan "no halos, no ghosting, no reflections" on our product pages. A filter rarely produces halos itself, which are created inside the filter by internal reflections (this happened to us once in 2015, but we replaced all of these filters). Because the moment there are other surfaces near the filter, it is much more likely that light will be reflected from one of those surfaces, creating halos that...
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FAQ
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Why is the Neodymium Filter only 1mm thick
Kundenfrage:
Why is the Neodymium Filter only 1mm thick?
For me, this is a problem because a) focusing and (much important) b) backfokus, sinc I have the filters between coma corrector and camera sensor.
Will this change with the coming CMOS-filters? Or can you already offer an alternative (I have got an 8" F4)?
Thank you very much!
M13, captured with RASA 8", QHY 294C (with FCCT) and Baader Neodymium-filter 10x120s
© Christoph Kaltseis, 2021Answer: First of all, the Baader Neodymium (Moon & Skyglow) Filter (various versions available) is primarily an absorption filter (just like the Semi-Apo filter), which reduces light pollution by neodymium ions in the glass melt which absorb the especially troublesome parts of the spectrum. Additionally (and in contrast to all copies which are offered nowadays) it has the dielectric coating of the L-filter (= UV/IR block filter), whereby outside the photographically important spectral range from 400 to 700 nm no light reaches the chip for which the telescope optics is not corrected in most cases. The result is that deep-sky images have stars that are almost half as large as those shot without the filter.
At the same time, this sophisticated filter design provides additional suppression/reduction of both the skyglow from common street lamps (mercury and sodium vapor lamps), but also the increasingly dramatic disturbing deep blue skyglow caused by the primary emission from modern LED cars and street lamps. This makes the Baader Neodymium (moon & skyglow filter) an excellent all-rounder filter for both visual and photographic applications.
The disadvantage is indeed the need to reduce the substrate thickness to 1 mm. If you want to use the neodymium filter photographically, you should not combine it with other filters, but only use the neodymium filter as an in itself combined anti-light pollution and L-filter with CMOS color cameras! Then you don't need additional deep sky filters for color cameras!
Many manufacturers do not consider this necessity of thickness reduction of the neodymium glass. As a result, exposure times increase unnecessarily and the finished image (as well as the visual impression) loses brilliance and is perceived as dull and uninteresting, precisely because too many neodymium ions are present at the double glass thickness of 2 mm. So, they "swallow" both desired and unwanted photons. In comparison tests of different copies - all offered as Moon&Skyglow - you can clearly see the difference.
The use of the selective absorption properties of the element neodymium (by the way, first used by Carl Zeiss as a contrast enhancer for photography) brings an additional photographic benefit that is usually not even mentioned. There are no halos even on the brightest stars and the natural impression of the sky background is completely preserved. With many other so-called "L-enhanced" filters, on the contrary, the stars are all discolored "dirty", the sky background appears in unnatural "pop colors" and halos "dominate the image".
Finally, your question about CMOS-optimized filters:
These are purely dielectric coated interference filters on fine optical, highly homogeneous glass, without any colored glass! They are manufactured in the standard thicknesses of our other interference filters and are the most suitable filters for all monochromatic CMOS chips to suppress light pollution highly effectively even from the center of cities, since they completely block ALL light - except the emission wavelength of a deep sky nebula. However, this comes at a dramatically higher cost than a relatively simple absorption glass.For beginners with color CMOS cameras, the Baader neodymium filter therefore belongs to the inexpensive standard accessories to ensure a natural sky impression with sharp stars.
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Unmounted Filters – which side should face the telescope?
For our CMOS-optimized filters we have created the following images showing which side of the filter should face the telescope.
LEGACY FAQ for older unmounted CCD-Filters without black outer rim
Question in Detail:
I just bought LRGB 36mm unmounted filters. I have question: which side of filter should be placed towards telescope? Is it better way of distinguish than "more shiny surface towards telescope"?
Answer:
Always put the more reflective side towards the telescope side. To guide you we already put a small arrow on the filter rim, on those filters were the position matters. This arrow indicates which face of the filter should be directed towards the sky (telescope-sided). All cell-mounted filters are already oriented in a way that the most appropriate filter face is facing the sky when the filter would be mounted directly onto the front end of the nosepiece of a camera.
If you mount your filter the other way, any reflected light would have a short way to the camera sensor, resulting in a higher risk of getting some kind of back-reflections inside the camera field. Many sensors have highly reflective areas near to the light sensitive area, also the area with the bonding contacts is sometimes highly reflective.But: this is true only for instruments without optical elements near to the focal plane. If you have f.e. a coma corrector, field flattener, focal reducer, focal extender (to a lower degree due to concave surface), or in extreme cases a whole lens group for more complex field corrections a few centimeters in front of the filter it could be useful to flip the filter against the rule from above (thus having the arrow pointing away from the telescope). Cause in such cases the likelihood of reflections from the sensor could be lesser then fort- and back- reflections from such glass-surfaces. If in doubt, it helps to make some test images from a star field with bright stars, using the filter in both ways for comparison.
Should you really have some reflections with both positions it can be more effective to add a spacer between filter and camera, eventually shifting the reflection out of the image field. With focal correctors having curved surfaces changing the filter-lens distance could help also.
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HALOS – viewed without prejudice
For our CMOS-optimized filters we have created the following images showing which side of the filter should face the telescope.
LEGACY FAQ for older unmounted CCD-Filters without black outer rim
Question in Detail:
I just bought LRGB 36mm unmounted filters. I have question: which side of filter should be placed towards telescope? Is it better way of distinguish than "more shiny surface towards telescope"?
Answer:
Always put the more reflective side towards the telescope side. To guide you we already put a small arrow on the filter rim, on those filters were the position matters. This arrow indicates which face of the filter should be directed towards the sky (telescope-sided). All cell-mounted filters are already oriented in a way that the most appropriate filter face is facing the sky when the filter would be mounted directly onto the front end of the nosepiece of a camera.
If you mount your filter the other way, any reflected light would have a short way to the camera sensor, resulting in a higher risk of getting some kind of back-reflections inside the camera field. Many sensors have highly reflective areas near to the light sensitive area, also the area with the bonding contacts is sometimes highly reflective.But: this is true only for instruments without optical elements near to the focal plane. If you have f.e. a coma corrector, field flattener, focal reducer, focal extender (to a lower degree due to concave surface), or in extreme cases a whole lens group for more complex field corrections a few centimeters in front of the filter it could be useful to flip the filter against the rule from above (thus having the arrow pointing away from the telescope). Cause in such cases the likelihood of reflections from the sensor could be lesser then fort- and back- reflections from such glass-surfaces. If in doubt, it helps to make some test images from a star field with bright stars, using the filter in both ways for comparison.
Should you really have some reflections with both positions it can be more effective to add a spacer between filter and camera, eventually shifting the reflection out of the image field. With focal correctors having curved surfaces changing the filter-lens distance could help also.
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Off-standard single filter sizes from Baader - why not:
Quite often we receive requests for a single filter in an off-standard size. In all cases we are sorry that we must answer as follows:
Sorry (we know it would be so very much cheaper in production - and we would be so much more flexible to fill special requests) - but we have decided long ago to not cut or saw our filters from large plates because this would leave the coating stack open and mutilated (with microscopic cracks) all around, prone to aging and peeling.
Many times we had the chance to inspect our competitors filters after several years of use (due to our 30+years of servicing SBIG-CCD-cameras/and filter wheels) and we realized already 15 years ago how moisture and heat stress can deteriorate even most modern hard coatings, slowly peeling off from the carrying substrate over time, unless the coating stack is sealed all around the filter stack.
As a consequence - in order to create our filters to remain impermeable - we only offer all filter substrates already cut to final shape and run each substrate on an double deck auto-polisher to achieve perfect optical flatness and freedom from cone errors.
Then we do individually coat these substrates in 500 pc per run as minimum to fill a complete coating chamber, in a way that the coating stack (many times 50+ layers) applied onto each filter won't reach to the very edge of the round or square substrate, so that the coating stack remains completely sealed from all sides. In this way we can ensure that our filters will not age at all.The sad effect is that we cannot offer other sizes unless the inquired production quantity were in the range of 250 to 500 pc (depending on size) and the tooling rings or square holders will be paid for, which serve to precisely center each individual filter substrate within the rotating calotte inside the coating chamber. Sorry - as explained above - we just will not coat onto large plates and cut any shape from them, also because such large plates cannot be polished optically flat in the same way we do it.
For your most urgent need and for single piece solutions we can only recommend to order the next larger size of our respective filter and have that cut to shape by an ophtalmologist locally. We can supply the round filters without the metal cell in such cases; square filters come without cell in any case.
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