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

grey pilgrim wrote:

Jerry-astro wrote:

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.

I would have agreed with that assessment about the Ron 12 with the X-T3. I was always happy shooting it at f2.8. Now, with the X-T5, I am seeing significant coma at f2.8. Maybe the greater resolution is showing that up? Or maybe my technique needs a fine tuning.

The issue for me is lack of testing time here in the Pacific Northwest right now.

So far, it still looks like my copy of the Viltrox 13 is giving me better results at f2.8 than my two copies of the Rokinon/Samyang 12. Others have reported the Samyang 12 as great wide open with respect to coma. Mine are not. So, sample variation could be coming into play, or the testing conditions right now.

I did manage to get a 2 min tracked test of the Viltrox at f4, iso 200. Looked good. I tried other tacked shots where it became my polar alignment was off.

I've tried some stacking as well, but it looks like there were clouds hitting some of the edges which messed those tests up.

Either way, I am keeping the Viltrox; it has shown me enough to convince me at f2.8 it's a solid performer.

Doug

My Rokinon is fine+ for MW shots but not stellar. I actually never tried it since I bought the tracker so I should. I also never took the XT5 on an astro shoot since it's too new. Probably will rent that Viltrox to benchmark it against the others.

That Batis 18mm/2.8 FF is just phenomenal, so the bar is high....