Re: Conrando or Thousand Oaks

I had a $$ (older) 1000 Oaks glass filter for my 8 inch SCT and ended up trading it back in on other astro goodies. It was just TOO dark to be usable! Even when shading the EP with a dark towel it was really hard to see the solar image and it was a dark yellow/brown that was not the most contrasty color to try to work with.

I've not tried it myself but for cheaps you could try making a Baader film filter (APM sells it, you have to mount it into a cap that fits over your OTA objective). Others will correct me here I'm sure but it's supposed to be a natural white view (nutral density only, no color modifications) and much brighter.

Good luck!

Tom Mengel

The lumicon/thousand oaks prominence filters are not at all worth the money (IMHO). If you're going to spend the extra money for an h-alpha filter, go for sub-angstrom (coronado/daystar). Daystars are phenomenal, but EXTREMELY expensive. Coronado solarmax filters would be my suggestion; the 40mm is VERY affordable is is quite an impressive view (I own one of these myself). The mak you have isn't a very good match for it though. My overall suggestion for someone wanting to test the waters of h-alpha is to buy a Coronado Solarmax 40mm filter with a borg 50ED or Coronado's maxscope (unless they already have a decent short focus refractor). Dedicated scopes for h-alpha are really great, you end up using them a lot more. My 84 cents.