What do I need to start astrophotography?
To get started with astrophotography, you’ll need:
A camera with full manual controls (or a phone with night/manual settings).
A tripod to keep your camera steady, and a phone adapter if you’re using a phone.
If you have a camera, a wide-angle, fast lens will make things easier.
For convenience, a headlamp is also handy. Stick to these basics, and you’ll be capturing stunning shots of the stars in no time.
For those of us with cameras already, the standard lens for astrophotography is the Samyang/Rokinon 14mm f2.8 Whether it is branded as Samyang or Rokinon depends on which country you buy it from.
Personally, I recommend the Mkii of this lens, differentiated easily in photos by the silver, not red ring (of the Mki) near the mount to the camera.
https://amzn.to/3Ybd0Yk . Why?
These lenses are relatively inexpensive and as such are great value.
They are an Ultra Wide angle lens, which means you can have a slower shutter speed, therefore letting in more light and allowing a lower ISO, and capturing so much of the Milky Way.
They offer a fairly fast maximum aperture of f/2.8 which lets in a fair bit of light.
The Series ii is weather-sealed, which is important when dew sets in (and it will!). For this reason this samyang/rokinon is my favourite lens to hire out during my classes. I personally owned the Mki of this lens, however a few heavy nights with heavy dew scared me into selling it to get a weather sealed lens.
It features a focus lock so you can spend less time focusing after you bump the camera.
For the price, the lens is fairly free of optical distortions such as coma and chromatic aberration.
It must be noted that this is a manual focus-only lens, but for us astrophotographers, this won’t matter as we need to focus manually at night anyway.
It must also be noted that if you’re new to photography, you’ll need to make sure this lens is in the correct mount for your camera system.
The link above is for Canon EF, mount, which is the mount for our Canon 6dii cameras that we hire out.
Here’s the same lens in other camera mounts:
Rokinon Series II 14mm F2.8 Weather Sealed Ultra Wide Angle Lens for Fuji x
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