I think that it's way too early for filters in the sort of photography you're doing. As others have said, the issue is exposure. Once you get exposure correct, you'd rather have light from all bands in your image. You can then work with Photoshop or another editing program to bring out or suppress the details you want. The problem that cameras have (DSLRs included) is that the automatic exposure typically averages light over several parts of the field. Since the moon, Venus, etc often cover only a small part of the area, the average tells the camera there's less light than there really is. So the exposure time is jacked up. Many cameras--point and shoot included--have a feature that will let you knock the exposure back by a stop or two. This might be an option open to you if you can't directly control the shutter speed. As far as infrared is concerned, many (most?) digital cameras have an IR filter directly in front of the sensor. So you're probably not being affected by infrared. Michael On Jun 26, 2007, at 7:00 AM, Dunn, David wrote:
You can use filters to bring out certain types of features. In my experience, the detail that became visible was rough detail. The fine stuff along the edges of Jupiter's cloud bands was lost when filtered. There are many web pages with lists of what the filters will help you see. I just did a Google on filters planets and it came up with a bunch of pages. I have included two links that came from that list but there were many more. One more thing to consider about filters is their quality. A poor quality filter will affect that quality of the image.