What Canon lenses should you get for astrophotography?

My Main Camera:
Favorite Small/Travel Camera:

Lenses
Favorite Wide Lens
Favorite All Around Lens:
Favorite Telephoto Lens: (also, my favorite lens overall)

Tripods

My Star Tracker:

Bags

Mics
Backup mic

Filters

Lights

Follow me on social media!

[jermanoid]

Shooting a lens wide open is pushing the limit of the lens. I rarely shoot wide open because I'm usually looking for the crisp shot. The 1.8 to me is just breathing room and means i can shoot at 2.8. Just like with an F4, I'll typically shoot it no more than f5.6.

[digsfossils]

Thanks for all this info, and confirmation about using a f/4 for Astro and Milky Way photos.
I've had my eye on a Canon 10-20mm F/4 for Astro and Milky Way photos (and landscapes). But I still have a little more research to do.

[tarheelgarden]

The iris 21mm f1.4 ef is a good astro lens. You can get a good deal on a used one. The Laowa 15mm F2 rf is a good one too, way better than the Rokinon 14mm. The best and sharpest lens I've used is the old Sigma 35mm f1.4 art ef. I stop it down to 2.2 for less coma. I've made some great stacked shots panos with it!!

[Suprastar]

I enjoy Moon photography and use a Sigma 150-600mm at 600mm with either a 1.4x or a 2x teleconverter.

[Sockeye]

I use my old Sigma EF 14mm f1.8 with adapter on my R5. I am still waiting for a 14mm f1.4 for RF 🙂

[stacyegan]

Very informative video, thank you! My biggest take-away at the moment is that it encourages me to try the f/4 lenses I already have (EF 17-40 & RF 24-105) with my Canon R8, at least to dip into trying wider field astro. I've been put off by the common recommendations of f/2.8 or faster, which I don't have in lenses wider than 50mm. The longer lenses I have might be kinda fun too, if I delve into stacking and tracking.

[andreas_rr]

Since you mentioned the Laowa 90mm F/2.8, i'd also add the RF 85mm F/2 as an affordable medium focal length. There's more than enough room to stop down, and i've done some great northern lights images with it. Plus it also doubles down for portraits and low-key macro. Overall a great lens considering the price. Just keep in mind that the AF basically is unuseable for video, so that's one field to avoid the lens.
Asides from that, the 16mm is perfect considering the price. Put it on the R8 and you've probably got the cheapest still very powerfull combo for astrophotography.

[Hellseeker]

10-20mm looks pretty slick, I was already planning on the 24-70mm anyways.

[bamhamer]

the best rf lens for astro is an ef lens. sigma 14mm 1.8

which is pretty sad to see from a manufacturer like canon that they still dont have better options for astro

[inrain]

For my Sony A7R3 I have both the Sigma 16-28mm F2.8 and the Sigma 50mm F1.4. I like the latter a bit more because it is such a fast lens and you don't even have a hint of coma at F1.4.
I guess that at one point I'm going to buy the Sigma 14mm F1.4. But that has to wait as I feel I already have too many lenses. 🙃

[basilbcf]

My primary Milky Way lens is the Rokinon 14mm f/2.8 manual focus. That lens is amazing. The amount of coma in the far corners is practically null. Yes there is some, but you have to really zoom in a lot to notice it and it's only in the extreme corners - this is even wide open at 2.8. However, I tried my EF 50 f/1.4 wide open just for grins and the coma on that thing was horrible! Looks like giant bats flying around LOL!
By the way, I'm just up the road from you and one of these days I might ask you if you'd like to do a road trip with me to Valley of Dreams (Been there once but want top go again)

[potworzbagien]

Hi Brent. I just bought a used EF 16-35 f2.8L III lens in excellent condition. The lens is also recommended for astrophotography on various sites on the web. What do you think about this lens? I know it has a lot of vignetting and a little coma at longer focal lengths (24mm and 35). At 16mm the coma won't be a problem. I think it should be ok. The first and second generation 16-35 f2.8 weren't the best, but the third one has great reviews. I'm waiting for it to be delivered.

[christianwetzel]

Thanks for your helpful suggestions! I was lucky to have bought the Samyang/Rokinon 14mm RF lens with autofocus, it's fantastic and I was able to catch some nice aurora pictures with it lately. Unfortunately it wasn't on the market for long due to their licensing litigations with Canon. They still offer the MF version for RF though, really affordable, and if one is using it mainly for astro anyway, manual focus should not be a an issue.

[dw.in.michigan]

I have an Irix Firefly 15mm F2.4. It's not perfect, but it's very good, and the rectilinear distortion is very well controlled. I like it much better than the Samyang/Rokinon 14mm F2.8 manual. The manual 14mm seems more prone to good copy/bad copy coin toss - had a great one for Canon, but when I switched to Nikon, it was terrible, and many reviews mentioned the variability on quality as well. However, I've seen reviews on the newer ones that have AF, and they are very favorable.

Otherwise, I've had very good luck with my Samyang primes, and I've found that I prefer the cine versions, except that they aren't chipped. Luckily, Nikon has the non-CPU lens feature that allows you to enter the basic exif data.

[francestabor]

Thank you, this was very informative. I’m excited to see more content.

[evemitchellanderson]

For astro you should stick with ef lenses sigma 14mm 1.8, 20mm or 24 1.4, or the magic Canon 35mm II 1.4 Sigma 35 1.4 or Tamron 35 1.4

[seb]

Great topic, was wondering about that, I kept the RF 24mm f1.8 just because of f1.8 giving me that room of shooting at f2.8 exactly to reduce the coma :). Denoising takes care of the rest at high ISO but I wish we had a wider better one and I had the RF 16mm but it was worse IMO than the 24mm.

[craigpiferphotography]

I'm still wanting to try astro one of these days, but have never had a lens that I feel is truly adequate for it. The widest I have is an old Tamron 19-35, but I noticed in my aurora shots that it does have a bit of coma, even stopped down to f/4.

[randellt]

Great info as always! I had very good sucess with my Canon EF 70x200 1: 2.8 I think it's my favorite glass of all time.

[spidersj]

I have the Sigma 24mm F1.4 EF mount, and I use the control ring adapter for my EOS R and R5. Shooting the northern lights even out my back bedroom window to get near pinpoint stars with no streaking due to the earth's rotation, I shot it at F1.4 ISO 100 and 8 seconds. It's an awesome lens and inexpensive, it's not got image stabilization, but for astrophotography, who cares. The 400 or 500 rule helps figure out how long your exposure should be at your given focal length. For side landscape shots at sunset, shooting the Sigma 24mm at F1.4 and ISO 100 is also great because you can do bracketed shots with fast shutter speeds if let's say there is a lot of wind and you don't want that messing up your merged image of you use storage that auto merges your bracketed shots.