Japanese filter and accessory manufacturer Hoya has introduced its new light pollution cut filter, Starscape. The filter is designed specifically for nighttime photography, enabling photographers to capture star-filled night skies in areas where light pollution could limit visibility.
The Starscape filter is designed to reduce the glare produced by the mercury and sodium vapor lights commonly found in cities. According to Hoya, its filter cuts the greenish and yellow hues that may result from artificial light pollution, ultimately offering what the company describes as 'natural color reproduction.' It's unclear how well it can handle light pollution from LEDs, however.
Hoya will offer the Starscape 1.5 ND filter in 49mm to 82mm sizes; it features a low-profile aluminum frame and 0.5-stop exposure reduction. Pricing and availability information hasn't been revealed at this time.
A bit useless considering the sodium lights have been replaced with broadband daylight LED street lights. Just last night when I noticed a bright light through the venetian blinds, thinking it was a car or a full moon I went outside to discover they replaced the sodium lights with new LEDs. The reflection off the road is bright white, the colour of the stars!
This new light spectrum cannot be filtered and the light intensity is much higher than before. My neighbour will need a black out curtain as the light is right outside her bedroom window!
Astrophotography from my back garden is now less possible.
Light pollution filters have been on the market for 15+ years. It's hard to say if this one is any different (I'm 99% sure it isn't) without seeing the spectral bandpass. LED streetlights are definitely a problem for astrophotography, but there are filters that have a bit more narrow bandpass centered on h-alpha and OIII lines, so if the filter supresses other wavelenghts, it will definitely reduce skyglow and help the contrast. Also, LEDs have a peak in the blue spectrum which can be filtered out - but it still harms the ecosystem and drastically reduces melatonine production in humans - a hormone that regulates out circadian rhythm ("inner clock").
That's why here in Croatia we have a new light pollution law forbidding LEDs above 3000K. You should have one too, regardless of where you live.
I'm not an expert on optical filter design, but I fully understand analog (electrical) filter design. It's not clear to me how FLO achieves multiple, sharp pass bands for the IDAS filter, unless the graph is just a marketing propaganda.
I'd appreciate some expert explanation.
The Hoya filter graph is easy to understand. It's mainly a band pass with a notch (aside from the ripple). The notch seems to target the blue spectrum (from LED lights).
Here at the bottom of Mauna Kea, in Hilo, we use streetlighting sparingly with a narrow bandpass. Its orangish. People turn their lights off because E is expensive. The effect is a very dark environment at night and little impact on the observatories performance on the volcanos.
What does a dark night do to you? The quality and duration of sleep is beyond what people measure in sleep labs as healthy - and which measure and aggregate defective sleep patterns of a sleep deprived population.
What does a visit to light polluted Mainland do? Not beeing able to see the starfield is disconcerting. Its like living in a dimly lighted burrow with a 500m ceiling height. The less than full spectrum lighting makes your body and thus your psyche cringe. Beeing subjected to the nationwide masterclock of 50hz is weird.
Feels like you are swalloed and digested in the belly of the machine. Maybe they need to make eyeglasses with 3k + bandpass to filter out all weird peaks.
The spectrum graphs for this new Hoya and their old red intensifier or "didymium" filter look nearly the same FWIW, click on specs for the old one and description for the new one:
It sounds like these filters aren't the usual "hot mirror" interference type narrowband filters. According to Hoya, the filtration is done via some "special glass formulation" although they don't elaborate on that. What they do say is that these filters will give better color results at the edges when used with wide angle lenses compared to conventional light pollution filter, -since the interference type filters work differently when the angle the light is coming through them changes they can show weird color shifts at the edges when used with wide angles.
They actually went on to clarify they're one and the same on their site (wasn't there initially since I read this news post and went looking at time time, just happened to notice it recently when checking what sizes they make).
I love the adventure of trying new filters but I’m not an astrophotographer...Would this filter have potential to produce interesting effects in terrestrial photography?
It would improve the color quality of outdoor night photography under sodium or mercury vapor lights, as it would cut down the yellow/orange or green cast respectively. Other than that it probably doesn't have any other "terrestrial" uses.
Actually, it's a filter to cut both the yellow/orange cast caused by sodium vapor lamps or the green cast from mercury vapor lights. Check out the spectral transmission graph that Hoya has posted on their website. It shows some pretty narrowband cuts at the light wavelengths produced by both those kinds of lighting.
LED lighting is generally pretty broadband and is closer in spectral content to conventional incandescent bulbs, for instance. Of course, depending on the color temperature of the LEDs you're going to get more red with some and more blue with others. It's going to vary with the type and brand of LED lights.
= if I place this green-cast-cutting filter over my my pea-soup-filled lomography liquid lens whilst shooting LomoChrome Metropolitan film, will I get a trinity chocolate fine art effect...?
This is old technology. Have existed for a loooong time. Now, more or less, obsolete, as sodium and mercury lamps are on their way out. Replaced by LED.
Did the old didymium "enhancer" filters work for mercury? I would expect they'd work well for sodium since they're also used by glass flameworkers to hide the sodium flare and make it easier to see the workpiece.
Actually this filter is targeting the blue spectrum from LED's. It's easy to understand that by looking at the frequency response curve.
The technology is not new, but that does not prevent the design of new filters with different curve (frequency response) characteristics.
It is not easy to design filters to target some noise/pollution when the noise is at similar wavelengths, or close to the wavelengths of the subjects you are trying to photograph. Tough challenge to optics engineers.
@sh1043 - the article says the exact opposite: "The Starscape filter is designed to reduce the glare produced by the mercury and sodium vapor lights commonly found in cities. According to Hoya, its filter cuts the greenish and yellow hues that may result from artificial light pollution, ultimately offering what the company describes as 'natural color reproduction.'"
Light pollution from LED lighting is actually harder to filter out, as LEDs produce light that's pretty broadband in terms of the different colors making up white light. Sodium vapor and mercury vapor lights produce light at only a few specific wavelengths of light, and it's easier to target just those particular parts of the spectrum with a filter.
The sad part is that companies started making those kind of filters about the same time as cities started moving towards LED lighting en masse. Making those filters useless.
I guess this might still work in some places, but not for long, probably.
Multispectral LED lighting is a CURSE for astronomy. If cities regulate it (and scummy advertisers don't want that) by making sure it is properly shielded, it won't be so bad.
It's unclear how this handles LEDs because, aside possibly from the amber LEDs designed specifically to reduce glare for observatories, it can't.
Mercury and sodium vapor lamps produce light at very specific frequencies, whereas both the blue LEDs producing the light in a white LED as well as the red/green phosphor mix produce a wide spectrum. It's not possible to block the light produced by a white LED without also blocking much of the visible spectrum.
I'm curious, I think for city lighting you want to use rather warm or amber colored LEDs so to not disrupt the sleep cycle of all the people living in the city. Right? You also want to use LED lights because they are more energy efficient. So is there even a chance to have like a standardized LED light spectrum for city lighting that can be filtered? Or do LEDs always have a broader spectrum?
LEDs by their nature have an extremely narrow spectrum - so narrow that it can potentially cause colored objects to appear black, which can be a safety issue.
White LEDs have a phosphor layer that takes the energy from a blue LED, allows some to pass, but converts the rest to other colors in the spectrum.
There are now "phosphor coated amber" LEDs that are specifically designed for the use case you describe. HOWEVER, PCA LEDs have a very broad spectral emission, so can't be notch-filtered.
Ah thanks. Didn't know about the phosphor layer to convert the wavelengths! I guess it's rather unlikely to imagine cities switching to narrowband LEDs for the sake of astro photographers (even if it did work to produce acceptable lighting)
It's not the astrophotographers. LEDs, especially the blue wavelenghts, are very harmful for human health (melatonine production), birds, insects, bats and all other nocturnal animals.
Blue light also creates more glare, which isn't good for nighttime driving, especially if you have certain vision issues, like cataracts. So amber-ish lighting (such as what comes from sodium vapor lamps) is better in that regard, and won't disrupt sleep cycles or wildlife as much.
I believe that on the "big island" of Hawaii sodium vapor lamps are mandated so as to not interfere with all the astronomical observatories at the top of the Mauna Kea volcano. The light from sodium lamps is easier to filter out than broadband LED or incandescent lighting.
If it could cut through the glare of lights from NYC and reveal the heavens then I”d buy two of them, mount then to an eyeglass frame and take nightly walks admiring the Milky Way.
Thanks to the ‘pooper scooper law’ things have greatly improved on the ground. In the past dodging dog sh!t on the street became an art form and while some deadbeat dog owners still break that law the majority do pick up after their dog. Now New Yorkers can safely look up to an almost perfectly black sky and no amount of Vitamin A can change that.
APenza I have Specsavers eyeglasses that have a special coating to remove night time glare especially when driving. They do seem to work. Perhaps I could get them to coat a standard UV filter with the same coating instead of buying the Hoya filter.
This is strictly marketing. Taking something that they already make (intensifier), rebranding it, and jumping on the popularity of wide-field star time-lapse photography. There are no true short cuts. These filters do help, a little, but overall, if you want something jaw-dropping, you have to get more remote and 'interesting' to capture something worthwhile. Hoya is strictly just capitalizing on a trend.
I was gonna make my own post about this. But I'll just comment under Mssimo's post. Utterly worthless video, alas. But the product itself might be quite effective...I'll have to wait and see performance reviews once the product is out in the market.
If you really want useful information on those filters you should check out Hoya's website. There is a spectral transmission graph, and before and after photos:
I would speculate that as more LED lights become common, this kind of filter will become more and more obsolete. It seems rather late to the game, but probably to fill the popularity in this style of photography these days.
My thoughts exactly - should have had this 30 years ago. And it shouldn't be too hard to make a filter for this sort of pollution - low presure and high pressure sodium lamps emit two specific wavelengths that are always the same.
Most LED street lamps have recessed elements so much of the light pollution from LED's are ground reflections - which is significantly less then many vapor lamps with the clear teardrop cover that tends to emit some of its direct lighting up into the sky.
There are plenty of HPS (high pressure sodium) lamps that are of the fully cut-off type, meaning they can direct all of their light towoards the ground where it's needed. It' just that lighting designer DON'T CARE about light pollution and spill light towards the sky, unless you make them, by some kind of law, like we did here in Croatia. With LEDs - there is no other choice, because LEDs are highly directional. You can still have a filter that blocks the "blue peak" in LEDs, and has a narrower h-alpha and O-III pass lines, so it blocks other parts of LED spectrum.
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