32mm - Milky Way at f/1.4 tonight (PICS)

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I drove to the mountains tonight to test the EF-M 32mm f/1.4 STM lens with the Milky Way. I haven't had time to edit anything properly and yet I thought the results were interesting enough to share here. Images were sharper than expected with virtually no Coma visible, even at f/1.4. Colors were good. Weather changed too quickly with clouds moving across the Milky Way as the sun set on one horizon and the moon rose on the other. I literally did not expect the image quality to be so sharp with the milky way and I was lucky to be able to manually focus on a star before taking these shots. Even the foreground trees and power poles were sharp, despite my focus lock being on the stars.
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* EOS M6 camera used.
* All but two of these images were taken with a tripod + self timer. 
* Taken in JPEG with the camera. 
* No sharpening applied other than the in-camera JPEG processing.
* No Crops
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Moonrise ruined my dark sky.

ISO 1600 with 15 seconds at f/2.2
First shot I took, looking straight up at the Galactic Core with perhaps too long of a shutter speed. This image was taken with Auto White Balance and has not been edited.

Again, the moonrise at about 8:15pm was looking more like a sunrise.

ISO 1600 for 10 seconds at f/1.4
Taken with Tungsten White Balance - surprisingly detailed. A minor "levels/curves" tweak was made to this image.

Looking West, there were clouds moving in which cut my night to just 15 minutes.

ISO 800 for 8 seconds at f/1.4
This image is essentially how it came out of the camera... just the slightest tweak to levels was applied.

Handheld at a lookout @ ISO 3200... some construction workers stopped to check out the rising moon and take a few pictures of their own.

NiSi Natural Night Filter used for this shot...Sydney's outer suburbs beneath light-pollution (which is why I drove up to the mountains).

NiSi Natural Night Filter used for this shot... Moonrise 1

NiSi Natural Night Filter used for this shot... Moonrise 2

Handheld - you can see a little bit of 'Bokeh-Swirl' here in the background.

A NiSi Natural Night Filter fitted on my 32mm f/1.4 lens with step-up rings to the EOS M6 was used for some of the shots above (three shots but not the Milky Way). I'm not sure I got the Kelvin point right with 3500K and will try again at 5000K in the near future.

J Peters wrote:

Hi Marco, would you favour the new 32mm lens over the 22mm f/2.0 pancake for astrophotography? I'm almost certainly going to buy the 32mm but will wait it out until a good deal comes along.

That's actually quite a hard question to answer... the 32mm f/1.4 lens appears to be sharper and is giving me more visible stars and detail than the 22mm f/2 lens. But the field of view is narrower. The 22mm lens is my favorite lens for astrophotography, even over the EF 24mm f/1.4 USM II lens... which produces much stronger Coma on a FF camera but much of that is cut out by the APS-C crop on the EOSM cameras.
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If you want to do astrophotography, this is going to be a VERY good lens for faint comets in the sky, lightning at night or for specific regions of the Milky Way. It's possible that it could be used for Mosaics to capture a wider view although without the Lens Correction features turned on, I imagine there might be a problem with light-falloff on the corners. for RAW shooters. Stopping the lens down to say f/2 might be a solution in some ways although then you lose the benefits of having an f/1.4 lens.
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The images below - were all taken with the EOS M and EOS M6 cameras over the last 6 years with various lenses.  They should demonstrate what to expect with a non-guided tripod and simple, single exposures. 
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EOS M + EF-M 22mm f/2 STM lens

EOS M6 + EF-M 22mm f/2 STM lens - NOTE: this image has been processed considerably.

EOS M6 + EF-M 22mm f/2 STM lens

EOS M6 + EF-M 22mm f/2 STM lens

EOS M + EF 24mm f/1.4L USM II lens

EOS M + EF 24mm f/1.4L USM II lens - (Andromeda)

EOS M + EF 24mm f/1.4L USM II lens

EOS M + EF 24mm f/1.4L USM II lens

EOS M + EF 24mm f/1.4L USM II lens

EOS M + EF 50mm f/1.2L USM lens

EOS M + EF 24mm f/1.4L USM II lens - Comet

EOS M + EF 24mm f/1.4L USM II lens - Three images merged

EOS M + EF 135mm f/2L USM II lens

J Peters wrote:

Thank you for the detailed reply. Some lovely ones there. The 32mm lens works out about $650 in the UK so you can probably see why I'm waiting for a while. Canon may do a cashbook offer or something.

They may although it's priced around where we expected it to be when the specs were first released.  Having purchased the lens at a price that was $50 more expensive than the pricing announced by a competitor located just a block away, I chose to pay the extra money rather than wait for the official release date here (in Australia).   All the other stores are still waiting for their stock to arrive.  It looks like that one lens slipped through because no other store seems to have it and I'll phoned or visited all of them.
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If you have the 22mm, it's a wonderful Astro lens and you probably don't need the 32mm lens if you already own the 22mm lens... although it's so darned bright that you may find use for it with comets later this year... or for creative photography in low light.  I'm just happy to have a bright lowlight lens to work with that's much faster than f/2.

I have this lens arriving in about 5 days time from Amazon, can't wait to take mine out for a spin! Thank you for sharing these, always love reading your works

Marco Nero wrote:

If you have the 22mm, it's a wonderful Astro lens and you probably don't need the 32mm lens if you already own the 22mm lens... although it's so darned bright that you may find use for it with comets later this year... or for creative photography in low light. I'm just happy to have a bright lowlight lens to work with that's much faster than f/2.

I also did some astrophotography, but I always had the problem of manualy focusing with this lens. In my opinion it's quite tidious with EF-M lenses in general. Do you have any special tips for this topic?

bmike wrote:

Praefos wrote:

Marco Nero wrote:

If you have the 22mm, it's a wonderful Astro lens and you probably don't need the 32mm lens if you already own the 22mm lens... although it's so darned bright that you may find use for it with comets later this year... or for creative photography in low light. I'm just happy to have a bright lowlight lens to work with that's much faster than f/2.

I also did some astrophotography, but I always had the problem of manualy focusing with this lens. In my opinion it's quite tidious with EF-M lenses in general. Do you have any special tips for this topic?

Agree. One of the reasons I picked up the Rokinon 12mm and adapted the Sigma 35. The focus by wire lenses are tough for astro.

EOS M6 + EF-M 22mm f/2 STM lens ready for an Astro shoot.

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To focus the lenses (eg 32mm and 22mm) I simply locate a bright star. Switch the camera to MF (in the menu) and then use the Magnify Feature to zoom in on the star. If your focus is very close, and you are using 10x Magnification, you'll find that the star will be easy to focus on. If it's slightly too far one way or the other (too near or too far yet not quite in focus) when turning the focus ring, the star will produce either a red or a blue halo around the star as the refraction produces Chromatic Shift. If you gently tease the focus ring left and right until you have a minimum of both red and blue shift, you'll find your lens is then in perfect focus. It only takes a moment. I sometimes bring a set of magnified $6 reading glasses with me to act as a visual assistance when doing this... or a jeweller's loupe. I keep one in my camera bag for this purpose although you may not need one yourself.
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* Mount Camera to Tripod.
* Switch to M-Mode (Manual Mode).
* Select your Aperture (ef f/2), Shutter speed (eg 10sec) and ISO (eg 1600).
* Turn on Timer (i use a 2 second delay but 10 sec is often fine).
* Aim camera towards a bright star.
* Turn focus ring until you can fee it faintly.
* Try to center the star in the middle of your LCD.
* Use touch screen and activate the Magnify feature (lower right corner).
* Now focus the lens on the star with the focus ring.
* Twist left and right until red and blue shift is minimal.
* Now your lens if manually focused - even if you turn off the camera. (unless you bump the focus ring)
* Take a picture or two and take a look at the results. Zoom in on the image to examine basic details. Don't be afraid to adjust your focus more than once during a shoot... although you'll get more confident with your procedure as you do this more often.  Nailing the focus should only take you 15 seconds or so.  It really is pretty quick to do.
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Taken (by accident) on my first evening shooting the Milky Way with the EOSM. I was overseeing my wife (crouched) who was setting up her DSLR to do the same. My flashlight was on since I wasn't aware I'd triggered the self timer on my own camera at the time.

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In the years I've been shooting the Milky Way with the EOS M cameras, I've only once had a shot slightly out of focus. As I said before, it doesn't hurt to make a second attempt to refine your focus later during the same shooting session. The trick is the play with the focus and slowly narrow it down until the least amount of red/blue shift appears around a star.  Lenses like the 22mm and 32mm lens for the EF-M mount have more play than the EF lenses but they are still impressive to work with.  The 22mm lens is slightly more forgiving than many other lenses.
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EF lenses (including my favorite, the EF 24mm f/1.4L USM II lens) often range PAST the Infinity setting.  This means that when you reach infinity focus, if you keep turning the focus it will travel past this notch and your focus will be spoiled slightly.  There's a mechanical reason why they were designed like this but you'll find that there's a spot on the lens window that allows you to settle on that brings the lens into focus.  Not all lenses are the same so using non-Canon lenses might prove to require a different method for manual focus.
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Astro photography can produce some interesting and sometimes beautiful results - even more so if you are prepared to experiment a little.  On a moonlit night I often use the moon as a focus target to lock the focus of my lenses.    If the moon is bright enough to ruin any chance of photographing the Milky Way I might experiment with using it to illuminate my scene.  If you have long lenses or wide lenses you can time the rising of the moon to include it in a landscape.  I've even mounted my EOS M to the back of a spotting scope for more dramatic effects of moonrise shots.