KitZone
Astro lenses
The night sky can play a starring role in your photos. Here are the best lenses for shooting it
M
ost of us have felt very limited in our photography of late, unable to get out and about to the kind of places that we love to visit. An upside is that you can shoot millions of miles into the distance from your very own back yard, just by setting your sights on the night sky. Even so, light is arguably the most important raw material for photography, so things get a bit tricky when there’s very little to play with. Naturally, shooting outdoors in the middle of the night is particularly challenging, even when the subject in question is the Milky Way on a clear, star-studded evening.
To make matters worse, the night sky is not only very dimly lit, but it’s also large and constantly moving. For good results, you need a wide-angle lens with a fast aperture rating. Here are the best buys for astro lenses.
Matthew
Richards
The contenders
Getty
Irix
Digital Camera
BEST FOR PENTAX K
15mm f/2.4
Blackst
£574/$675
A night owl with fluoro markings
Lens mounts Canon EF, Nikon F, Pentax K
Designed in Switzerland and built in Korea, the Irix 15mm is available in Firefly and Blackstone options for Canon, Nikon and Pentax. They’re optically identical, but the Blackstone has a magnesium alloy rather than plastic casing, four weather-seals instead of three, and engraved fluorescent markings.
As a manual-focus lens, the focus ring has a typically smooth and precise operation with long rotational travel. A secondary ring enables you to lock the focus ring at any position.
Performance
Image quality is mostly excellent, with minimal lateral and spherical aberrations, and well-controlled distortion. Vignetting isn’t bad at f/2.4 but coma and astigmatism are pronounced, giving an irregular shape to stars. Both factors are much improved by going down a stop.
Digital Camera verdict
It’s a great wide-angle prime for general shooting, and comes at a very attractive price. Coma and astigmatism at the widest aperture are the only spoilers for astrophotography.