Wide-Band Optical Filter Optimized for Deep Imaging of Small Solar System Bodies

This paper describes a newly designed wide-band optical filter. It is optimized for deep imaging of small solar-system bodies. The new filter, which we denote as W i, is designed to reduce contamination by light pollution from street lamps, especially strong mercury and sodium emission lines. It is also useful for reducing unwanted scattered moonlight. Compared with the use of a commercially available long-wave cut wide-band filter, the signal-to-noise ratios in the detection of asteroids are improved by about 6% by using the W i filter.