Today's video is sponsored by Squarespace. I love weird lenses, and so this video is going
to be all about two weird lenses in my collection, and whether they're suitable for astrophotography.
This is the longest lens in my collection. It's the Canon RF 800mm f11 and this is the shortest
lens I own it's the Funleader 18mm f8 cap lens. I didn't buy either of these lenses with deep
sky astrophotography in mind but i've been really curious how they'll do under the stars
so tonight's the night i'm going to be testing these with my old trusty orion atlas mount and we
will see what kind of results i can get shooting the lagoon nebula in the constellation sagittarius
looking at the framing here with 18 millimeters on full frame my canon ra it's going to be a classic
milky way shot and at 800 millimeters we're just going to barely be able to get in the lagoon and
the triffid in the same frame with these being slow lenses at fixed f8 for this one and fixed
f11 for this one we're gonna have to let the photons collect for several minutes
in each sub-exposure so if you've watched my channel before you may have seen me do
30 seconds 60 seconds sub exposures but that's when i'm using fast lenses like at f2 of 2.8 with
these slow lenses we're gonna have to do three four maybe five minutes to get adequate exposure
and at 800 millimeter focal length with long exposures even the beefy orion atlas mount is not
going to be able to track the night sky accurately enough to get round stars at five minutes
with an 800 millimeter lens so i'm going to pair it with a william optics guide scope and
a zwo guide camera and with these devices we can use a software called phd2 to record the
movement of the stars every couple seconds and if they move even just a fraction of a pixel the
software can send a correction back to the mount so that it tracks the night sky more accurately
we won't need that level of accuracy for this short lens because with such a wide angle lens
those small inaccuracies in the tracking won't show up in the photos what we will need to do
with the 18 millimeter lens is put the camera right on the front end of the dovetail so that
we don't get the dovetail in the shot at all so before we jump into the photos let's first take a
look at the design of these lenses and also where they shine outside of the astrophotography context
first off both of these are rf lenses rf mount but fun leader does make this lens for all of the
mirrorless camera systems including sony nikon all that the canon 800 rf is only for canon r
mirrorless cameras fun leader literally calls this their cap lens all one word with the idea that it
could replace the body cap on your camera which is exactly how i've been using it but i've also been
using it as a fun walking around lens that allows me to basically get cell phone quality photos
but with full manual control of you know shutter speed iso picture profile all the things that i
can do with my canon i also find it much more comfortable taking photos with a camera with a
grip versus doing it with my phone so i use this when i'm just walking around in place of my cell
phone basically so here's maggie at walden pond at the thoreau museum and so for bright daytime
shots i think this is really fun uh not too much to say about the design because there's
not much to say about it there's no moving parts it's a fixed aperture at f8 fixed focus
at anything about three feet away to infinity um it so it can't do any kind of close focusing uh
but that won't be a problem for astrophotography of course the lens is only i can get it off here
15 millimeters thick it weighs about 80 grams or three ounces and uh i've been having a lot of fun
with it even though it's not the best quality lens necessarily for the canon 800 millimeter rf f11
lens i bought this for daytime nature photography i was especially interested in the ability to use
this hand-held with the image stabilization on like this and you might be thinking that's crazy
with such a massive lens but the thing is by making it a fixed f11 canon was actually able
to make this very lightweight considering the length this is just about two and a half pounds
and so i find it pretty comfortable for going around handheld and uh in my limited tests that
i've had so far i just got this pretty recently you can see it here handheld on an adolescent
goose that i think came out pretty well i love the expression with the cocked head and those little
water droplets there on his head and then here's a test of a cool cloud formation this was also done
handheld and if you follow me on instagram i'm planning on bringing this lens on a big trip this
next week so you'll see more results like these ones in my instagram stories if you're interested
this lens also works great on the moon as you might expect if you follow my youtube channel
you've probably seen me recently doing the total lunar eclipse on a star adventurer with this lens
and this camera and i thought it did really great for that the moon looked pretty sharp
there wasn't much fringing in terms of physical characteristics
in its retracted state like this it's 282 millimeters you can have it like this for storage
when you actually want to use the lens though you do have to extend it out like this and that makes
it 352 millimeters or over 13 inches long it has three sides on the side of the barrel here
one is for stabilization one is for auto focus or manual focus and one is for focusing distance
which is really just an auto focusing thing for astrophotography we want it on manual focus
and we want the stabilizer off because i have been in cases where i forgot to turn the stabilizer off
and get weird star shapes because it's trying to do little micro movements to stabilize
uh okay before i forget today's video is sponsored by squarespace squarespace is the all-in-one
platform for designing and hosting a beautiful website or portfolio and i've been meaning to
revamp my personal website nicocarver.com for many years i know that i'm a procrastinator
but when this opportunity from squarespace came up um i was i jumped on it because i really did
want to use their professional uh templates to put together something quickly and i chose one that i
thought looked good i was able to just drop in my photos into different categories uh you know i got
to pick what those categories were of course and i can add as many as i want you can see actually
i just made some new categories uh today for these shots that i'm taking with the rf800 so i added a
new birds category and a clouds category because i love taking photos of interesting clouds actually
and so everything when i was designing this is a what you see is what you get editor which i really
love it's truly a real-time preview you can see what you're doing there's no coding necessary and
i think squarespace would be a great choice if you want to have a nice professional looking spot to
share your astrophotography with your own domain name and so if you're interested head over to
squarespace.com slash nebula photos you can start your free trial and if you like it you can get 10
off your first purchase of a domain or hosting with the code nebula photos so now let's turn to
the main event with the fun leader 18 millimeter cap lens here is a single exposure at four minutes
and you can see it has pretty extreme vignetting and plenty of distortion away from center
and that becomes even worse when you stack here's a stack of 12 with the foreground cut off
and i maybe could have tried to do sky flats but i didn't end up doing that so i ended up
just cropping down a bit and then i put in one of the foregrounds back in to make the final shot
that's my friend hatham with the red light there and i think it adds a little bit of
interest to have a foreground whenever you're doing milky way
so to evaluate this we still have both vignetting we have color shifting away from the center
in the very center though the stars and colors and details actually look fine to me the fun leader
was about what i expected maybe a little better in the center on the other hand with the rf 800 i was
actually pretty surprised by how good it looked this is a single five minute exposure and when
i saw this for the first time i was like wow for a sub 1 000 800 millimeter lens that did pretty well
at least for nice bright deep sky objects like the lagoon and triffid here the f11 wasn't a huge
impediment for getting a nice shot and the star field is what's really pretty nice there's not
much distortion not much chromatic aberration even in the corners the stars look pretty sharp here's
a stack of 12. and with the stack you do see a little bit of aberrations on the stars there's
this hourglass distortion on the bright stars and that's actually a pretty common distortion
that afflicts you know even very well regarded lenses like the rokinon 135 wide open i've even
seen it on takahashi scopes i can't remember if it has a more scientific name but i just call
it hourglass distortion it basically just looks like two little triangles were cut out of the star
um and other than that this is a you know pretty noisy for an hour of integration you know compared
to what i'm used to because i use fast lenses usually this is a very slow focal ratio but you
know that's to be expected you could just shoot more and and be closer in on your objects with
more detail so i didn't buy these lenses for deep sky astrophotography and again i don't think they
are particularly good value necessarily for deep sky alone given that they're slow fixed aperture
but i'm mostly thinking them as daytime lenses and then the rf800 was also pretty good for lunar
but after seeing these results i think that i might be trying the rf800 on some other deep sky
objects because it actually renders star fields pretty shockingly well and it gives me that reach
of 800 millimeters in a pretty small lightweight package and so i think i'm going to try this on my
star venture gti next because i think that might be under or i know it'll be under the payload
limit because this is really light and um my gti can guide just about as well as my orion atlas so
let me know in the comments what deep sky object do you think i should try this combo out on next
i'm thinking maybe a bright galaxy like one of the messier galaxies might be a good
bet so anyways my final thoughts are the fun leader cap lens fun daytime lens but won't be
coming out again at night at least for me the rf800 on the other hand is a lot more versatile
than i thought it would be it's great for wildlife lunar and actually decent on star fields and
bright deep sky objects well till next time this has been nico carver at nebula photos clear skies