[gregbradley]

It would be a good thing if people can post which camera lens they have found to be good and on which camera.

I found Nikon 180mm F2.8 ED good on an SBIG STL. Canon FD 200 F2.8 and 85mm were good.
Pentax 67 165mm F2.8 and 300mm F4 is good. 55mm F4 not so good but OK stopped down to F5.6 and also
using 2x2 binning on the camera. Nikon 50mm F1.8G is really good. I have Canon 50mm F1.8 and it appears to be
identical in terrestial imaging so most likely also for astro.

I am wondering if the Nikon 14-24mm would be good on a 16803 CCD. I will get a Nikon adapter from FLI and start
using some of these nice Nikon lenses on it to see how it works out. I think that one should be awesome.

Greg.

Originally Posted by Kunama

Thanks Greg, Good info.
I had the 180 F2.8 Ais MF and it certainly was one of the best lenses I have owned.
My current and longtime favourite lens is the AF-S 80-200 IFED F2.8
beautifully sharp zoom.

Nice lens.

Originally Posted by Octane

I can also vouch for the 180mm f/2.8ED lens. It's a stunner.

H

I had that lens once. Very nice. I think I used it on the STL11 and it worked well.

Originally Posted by Omaroo

Yup, I have the 105mm f/2.5 and have loved it for decades. A great astro lens, I'm also now enjoying it on my OM-D.

I picked one of those up in great condition yesterday on Ebay for the princely sum of $240. A new 105 F2.8 with vibration reduction etc is about $1250. Optically though it is probably either identical or very similar to the $240 version which is considered a classic portrait lens.

Originally Posted by gbeal

While agreeing with most that is written here, I'd add that not all camera lenses are suitable for astro use. Even those "rated" highly by daylight/terrestrial users. CA, coma, and field curvature are always blatantly obvious when a star-field is imaged, not so with a portrait or landscape.
Astro and CCD combine to bring out the worst in optics somehow.
Having said that I have had good results with the Pentax 67 series, and a few of the Leitz/Leica series. I know others have had great results with the Nikkors.
Gary

That is true. How to find out which is best with astro imaging is difficult though. I think a few basic guidelines may help though. Longer focal lengths are less lilely to show bad chromatic aberration than shorter focal lengths.

Faster F ratio lenses are more likely to show chromatic aberrations and spherical aberrations than longer f ratios. For example Martin's recent image test with a Canon 85mm F1.2. This is a highly desirable camera lens with fabulous background blur and super fast but you can see the compromises an optical designer has to make when making fast lenses and it had bad chroma in astro images.

Nikon and Canon 50mm F1.8 is a safe bet.

Modern cameras have built in chromatic aberration correction either in the camera or in the supplied software so this is not considered as important in terrestial photography as it is in Astrophotography.

Mind you its not that hard either to correct blue/purple ringed
stars. Noel Carboni has a Photoshop action that works really well. So does selecting the stars in the image, widen by several pixels, feather by a few pixels and then play with selective colour mainly set to magenta and reducing magentas and increasing cyans.

Also stopping down the lens a stop or two usually helps with all the lens defects, coma, chromatic aberrations, distortions.

Greg.