SAMYANG

I love that this lens has a wide-open aperture of 1.8. It means I can stop it down to what I believe to be the sweet spot of around f2.2 or 2.5, making the stars that much sharper, while minimising bloating of stars and keeping coma to a minimum in the often dreaded corners (more on that later). Shooting at f2.2/2.5 is also a great trade-off to still capture as much light as possible. I was so happy to see the back of the camera after those first few shots showed up on the screen. As I mentioned, the 24mm f1.4 was always my go-to lens for Astro. I was delighted to see that the quality of this lens is in my opinion even better than the older model. This lens is SHARP!

My very first outing with the lens was on a visit to Queenstown with the talented Lee Cook. We decided we would make our way to the top of the Remarkables mountain range and shoot the Milky Way arching over Queenstown. We arrived at the location at around midnight and made our way up to the lookout. To our delight it was eerily still at the top, not a breath of wind and the only sound being the faint hum of snow-making machines in the distance. We shot images for several hours until our toes went numb. This image named "Endless Skies" was the pick of the bunch for me. 16 images stitched together, Untracked, F2.2, 10 second exposures, captured on Sony A7Riii with the Samyang AF 24mm F1.8 FE lens (of course).

The lens has a special feature relating to the focus hold button called Astro-Focus mode. In a nutshell, pressing the focus hold button while turning on the camera will activate the mode. This automatically sets the focus point to infinity, ensuring super sharp stars every time. If the focus ring is bumped or turned, simply press the focus button again and the led on the lens will flash green, letting you know you are back to infinity. The focal length is also customisable, in case infinity is not quite where you want to be.

I think this function definitely serves a purpose in certain situations, especially if someone has trouble manually focussing on a bright star or whose eyesight is not what it used to be. It is also great for beginners just getting into Astro, as it will save a lot of time and frustration. I'm sure we've all had those nights where we struggled to get pinpoint stars. Personally, I couldn’t help but feel like I wanted to keep double-checking that infinity focus was in fact giving me the sharpest stars, therefore most times I ended up manually focussing. I put this down to habit more than anything though, as every time I double-checked, sure enough, the lens was picking up the stars with pinpoint sharpness. I think this is a feature that I will begin to use more and more as I feel more comfortable with it.

The corners of an Astro image are often the true test of a lens’s performance. The AF 24mm F1.8 FE is advertised as having 11 Elements in 8 Groups, with a UMC coating to minimise Chromatic Aberration and Coma. Doing a bit of pixel peeping, I have to say that this lens does live up to the hype. There's no doubt that like any lens, there is a little bit of CA and Coma present in the corners, but as I stopped the lens down a bit to the sweet spot of f2.2 I noticed this start to decrease. Once I paired the lens with a tracker, I was able to stop down, even more, making the stars pretty damn sharp even in the corners. See below to get some close-ups.