|
Is there a particular lens you are interested in Janet? What is the purpose of the lens/telescope? Do you want to take photos or do you want to look at things visually? From my experience, yes you can get some reasonably good photos with a zoom lens but you need a good tracking mount for the camera to run on to avoid trailing stars. The focal lengths are pretty small though and are only really good for big nebulas and wide field images. If how ever you want to look at objects in a bit more detail (and photograph them) you can get much more bang for your buck so to speak by getting a telescope like a dobsonian. For the cost of a fairly cheap zoom lens with pretty poor optics for astronomy and a zoom range up to say 300mm ($300-$500) you could get an 8inch Dobsonian with a focal length of 1200mm and see so much more detail like the cloud bands on Jupiter and the rings of Saturn where as through a zoom lens the planets would be just bright points of light.
|