Viltrox 13mm for astro, done better? And quite possibly a thumbs up

zurubi wrote:

I'm on the fence on this lens hoping that it'll do better than the Rokinon 12mm. The absolutely best I have now is a Sony a7r3 with a Batis 18mm (equivalent to 12mm on APS-C). But now that I upgraded to the X-T5, i'd love to find a lens that comes close to that Batis; also, not carrying 2 bodies would be nice. I mostly stack but bought a small tracker last year.

I did try the 16-55mm mounted on the tracker and it was disappointing. 16mm is also too long for the kind of astro shots I like to do.

Did you try several copies, or was this your 1st lens you got? I wonder how is the copy variation with this lens.

Well, from all I’ve read here and many other places, the Rok 12 is one of the best widefield astro lenses out there, so not sure what your issue is with it.  With a tracker, I’m a bit surprised that the 16-55 didn’t perform fairly well, at least at 16mm.  Most of what I do these days is widefield starscape shots with no tracking, so I’m usually using the wide end of my 8-16 f/2.8 lens — which, BTW, is simply superb for that purpose.  25s exposures yield a fair amount of detail, and you can play around with different ISO settings to see which one gives you the best combination of detail and minimal noise.  Obviously, with a properly aligned tracker, you should be able to increase the exposure time and capture even more detail.  I can’t tell you and what point the noise would become a real issue with a longer exposure since I no longer have any tracking capability.