Just bought a Samyang 16 f/2 from B & H and had the opportunity to test it last week. The lens is definitely a great lens for astrophotography. In the images below I was amazed to see how much detail showed up in these single shot exposure. The colors of the Milky Way show up nicely and there is even a hint of the elephant nebula in Cepheus, something only my A50/1.4 was able to reveal before. On the second shot North America nebula is easily spotted near the upper left. Coma and CA are well controlled. Stopping down to f/4 only marginally helped so the lens is going to work wide open all the time.
On the down side though the camera doesn't read the lens focal length so you have to input it manually. The thing is, there is no 16 mm setting so you have to choose 15 mm, a 6% underestimation. Therefore, even with a good precise calibration, 2 min shots start to show trailing while my M28/2.8 has no problem for exposure as long as 3 min. And what doesn't help is that the lens has lots of distortion making stacking with DSS impossible even with just 4 X 60s shots.
Anyhow I'm pretty happy since I bought the lens for wide fields with foreground elements which don't stack very easily. And at just shy of 500 CDN$ total landing cost the thing is a very very good value.
- 1 -
60 s iso 800, Pentax K-30, tracked with astrotracer function
- 2 -
60 s iso 800, Pentax K-30, tracked with astrotracer function
Clear skies!
