While I was setting up for the meteors on Monday night I tried out a lens that Nikon Australia lent me. It's the 300mm f4 with the fancy new fresnel lens element. Although this isn't the finest Andromeda pic in existence, there's a few things that are worth noting:
It is a stack of 40 x 60 sec exposures off the polarie - no autoguiding mount, laptop or deep cycle batteries needed. Motorbike portable.
It was wide open at f4 - no visible field curvature or chromatic aberration; stars were good enough all the way to the edge for the tracking to be the limiting factor.
There was plenty of smoke from the Gidgegannup fires and it wasn't very high above the horizon, which is why there are some faint haloes around the brighter stars.
Fortunately for me I don't need this lens, but I believe it's a serious contender for AP. I have cropped the image to about 85% of the original but if anyone wants to see a corner crop I'm happy to put one up to show what this lens can do. No association with Nikon other than they give me stuff to play with now :-).
Higher res here-
https://flic.kr/p/Bn3BCN
cheers,
Andrew.