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Originally Posted by Solanum
That's pretty depressing..... I do some work at a field site about 30 minutes from here (Mildura) and when I'm out there before dawn, the milky way literally goes from horizon to horizon, I would never have believed it if I hadn't seen it (multiple times) with my own eyes. Haven't had the scope out there though.
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Once you have experienced dark skies, suburban dso viewing pales in comparison and just doesn't seem worth the effort. That's my experience. Sorry!
On the upside, having a bit of aperture helps in enabling one to crank up the power to mitigate light pollution with smaller targets of high surface brightness. You can still get reasonable views of the brighter planetary nebs for example. Small scopes I find virtually useless in this context as you run out of light before getting a good amount of magnification.
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So do any of the 'light pollution' filters actually work? I would have thought it wouldn't be too difficult to create a filter that blocks the sodium lines alone.
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The problem is that not all artificial light is sodium lighting. Where I live I'm plagued with mercury vapour "flower pot" lights which have a broad spectrum that cannot be filtered out. The usefulness of light pollution filters is related to the amount of extraneous light of a nature that can be filtered.
In practical best case terms, the contrast gained by using a broadband LP filter could be emulated by a small increase in magnification, eg swapping a 12mm for a 10mm eyepiece.
There is no substitute for dark skies
Heres an Adelaide based page on LP
http://astronomy.concreteairship.com...i/lpgallry.htm