Best lens for night sky photography

[DT0914]

I have a canon eos 750d and I’m wondering what kind of lense would be best for shooting the night sky?

[William W]

Generally a Wide Angle Lens is 'best' for "Night Skies".

Your Camera is APS-C Format, and a lens which has a Focal Length around 12mm to 18mm would be desirable. Prime Lenses are typically better suited than zoom lenses: there are quite a few reasons.

However -

Do you have an EF-S 18 to 55 F/3.5~5.6 "Kit Lens" to use with your EOS 750D? If yes, then that is the best lens for you to use for a while until you get a few other Photography basics sorted.

At FL = 18mm it will give good results and you will learn much: probably firstly that you need a good quality Tripod and Head; then you can discover that "Night Skies" fall into two broad categories - (1) Star Trails and (2) No Star Trails. But there will be much more to learn, also.

***

As the technical answer to your question: arguably the EF 24 F/1.4L MkII is (one of) the 'best' lenses for Night Skies (my opinion it is 'the best'), however it needs to be used on an adequate 135 Format Camera (known as "Full Frame"), a later model 5D Series would be an excellent choice.

WW

[DT0914]

WW -

Thank you very much for your reply. I do have the ‘kit lense’ -

As you can probably tell I’m very new to photography. I’ve always had a keen interest, but now I’m behind the camera I’m slowly learning.

Thanks again :-)

[William W]

No Problem. We were all new when we began.

Take it slow and don't fall into the trap of thinking that buying more stuff will make the learning quicker or easier.

There are many talented and helpful photographers here at CiC - ask questions: no question is silly.

WW

BTW - the singular noun is spelt "lens", not "lense" - no offense intended, it is a common error.

[Manfred M]

On top of the camera / lens combination, the other critical requirement for night photography is a good, solid tripod that will hold your camera completely still for the duration of the exposure that will run from seconds to minutes to hours, depending on what you are trying to do. For any exposure longer than 30 seconds, you will need a remote release for your camera too (although these can be quite inexpensive).

A good rigid tripod, with appropriate head will not be an inexpensive proposition.

[Tringa]

If you want to record the stars as points of light rather than trails then the 500 rule is a good place to start.

Max exposure in seconds to prevent trailing = 500/(focal length of the lens x crop factor of the camera).

For you camera with your kit lens set at 18mm this rule gives a maximum exposure of about 17 seconds - 500/(18 x 1.6)

To borrow a phrase the 500 rule is more what you call guidelines, than an actual rule. Stars in different parts of the sky appear to move at different rates and a bit of experimentation is needed to find the limit.

Dave