page contents

Astrodon OIII 3nm 50mm Unmounted

Not in stock

£1,089.00
Price includes VAT, plus delivery

Bring Out The Faint Structures In Nebulae…

The next filter to complement your LRGBH-a set should be an oxygen filter. OIII (“ohthree”) emits light near 500 nm and is a blue-green- or teal-colored filter. Many of my images of planetary nebula and supernova remnants are taken only with H-a and OIII filters. They show great structural detail, but have natural colours, looking like an RGB image.

Astrodon OIII filters have a center bandwidth of 500.1 nm.

Astrodon Narrowband filters set a new bar of performance and durability for imaging and research.

The narrow 5 and 3 nm bandwidths enhance the contrast of emission targets by lowering your background signal. The guaranteed >90% transmittance at the emission wavelength provides you with the highest signal available.

This guarantee is expensive to manufacture for such spectrally narrow filters, but it assures you in writing on each filter box that you will get what you paid for. These two factors combine to provide you with the highest contrast available.

The latest Astrodon narrowband filters are typically achieving >95-98% transmittance. Astrodon Narrowband filters are renowned for minimizing halos around bright stars, even for long exposures of 30-45 minutes typical of narrowband imaging in astrophotography. Lastly, Astrodon Narrowband filters are coated to the edge of the filter and are edge blackened. This is critical to minimize stray light for a filter that blocks most light except for the narrow bandpass.

Astrodon Narrowband filters for imaging are all about contrast. What do we mean by this?

Contrast brings out faint features by reducing the background – the narrower the filter, the better. The problem is keeping the signal (%T at the emission line) constant as the filter becomes spectrally narrower.

This is why our >90%T guarantee is so important, even though it becomes very costly to manufacture. But, this assures you that you can take advantage of the improved contrast with our narrower filters compared to the much less expensive 7- 8.5 nm filters on the market. You can see the increase in contrast in the sequence of equal-exposure images of the Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888) taken on the same system and on the same night. As the bandwidth becomes narrower, the nebula “pops” out of the background, as does the faint surrounding nebulosity.

Actually, the >90%T is a legacy specification, since new production technologies employed over the past 3-4 years routinely produces 97-98%T at the emission wavelengths.

Random tests of a competitor’s low-cost 7 nm H-α filter showed %T values ranging from 86% down to 71%. Random selection of 5 nm Astrodon filters measured %T values at the H-α emission wavelength of 93, 98, 97 and 98%.

You will never know that you are using an inferiors filter compared to a 97% Astrodon filter because others do not guarantee this important performance parameter. Some 3.5 nm H-α narrowband filters perform even worse, ranging from 3-70% at the emission wavelength. Similarly, analysis of different 2016 lots of Astrodon 3 nm H-α filters measured 97, 97, 97 and 96%T.

Astrodon filters are more expensive, but you always know what you are getting. The best performance in the market – guaranteed. Our recent blueshift data show that Astrodon 3 and 5 nm filters can be used with nearly all systems as fast as f/3.5 with virtually no loss in emission signal, so you do not need to buy custom “upshifted” filters if you have both fast and slow systems.

Step up to the quality and performance of Astrodon narrowband filters.

Browse these categories as well: Astrodon, Imaging Filters 50mm