Astronomy Buff

Orion’s Mars Filter

by Tony on January 2nd, 2008

I got one of these for Christmas and was able to test it out in Colorado before I left. I used it on my 10-inch SCT with a 2x barlow and a 26mm eyepiece. This setup gave me a magnification of 154x and a 0.34 degree field of view.

There was a striking difference between the views with and without the filter. There isn’t much contrast right now on Mars because the polar caps aren’t in view but I was able to make out a bright band of red running horizontally along the equator that I could NOT see without the filter. If I had to be quantitative and use my calibrated eyeball, I’d estimate that I got about a 50% improvement in contrast using this filter.

This disk wasn’t as bright, but you’d expect that with a filter, not all of the photons are getting though.

I wanted to take some images to show the difference but there just wasn’t time last week since I was busy packing and getting ready to move, but I do plan to do that later this month.

This thing would probably really help imaging efforts through a webcam. I’ll give it a shot and let you know.

Overall, I recommend this filter. It costs $44.95 and is on sale right now for $35.95.

Here’s the link to the filter on Orion’s website.

Technorati Tags: orion mars filter, telescopes

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