Hi this is Graham from Jenham's Astro if you watch my channel you probably

realize that a lot of the Astro photos I take use one of these a Canon EOS

digital SLR and for most of those photos the cameras connected to one of two

things it's either connected to a prime lens that's to say a lens of a single

focal length like this one here the 50 millimeter Canon F 1.8 sometimes it's

connected to a wide-angle lens like this one the samyang 14 millimeter and now and

again you may have seen that you can produce

pretty okay results using a cheap old lens like this one so this is a 200

millimeter lens. For the rest the time the camera is connected to the back of

one of my telescopes like this one the Celestron C90. It occurred to me that

I've got one other lens that I've never used for astrophotography and it's this

one this is the kit lens that was provided with the camera when I

originally bought it and it's really stayed in its box and never been used

it's an 18 to 55 millimeter lens and even though this isn't the latest model

of the lens I've dusted it off and the idea of this video is to see whether we

can get some good Astro photos using a lens that you might already have lying

around or that you may have overlooked so what can we say about the kit lens or

other this range of focal lengths I'd say the first obvious thing when you

lump of plastic that is largely because it is a lump of plastic but that isn't

to say we're gonna dismiss it optically based on that we've got to give it a

test and find out how it performs in terms of focal ratio the lens can

operate at f/3.5 when it's operating as an 18 millimeter lens that's the fastest

ratio can operate at is most wide-angle setting and if you've got it operating

like a normal kind of lens a 55 millimeter setting then its speed is no

quicker than f/5.6 so what does that mean well if

we compared it as an 18 millimeter lens to this dedicated prime lens which is 14

millimeters so pretty similar then this one operates at f/3.5 whereas this one f/2.8 so on the face bit not a huge difference but I guess we're going to

expect quite a difference in performance just due to the different price but

we'll see and then at the other end of the scale if we operate it as a 55

millimeter lens and compare it with this 50 millimeter nifty 50 as it's called

which is a well-known good value and versatile lens from Canon then this lens

can operate at f/1.8 whereas the kit lens is operating at f/5.6 so that is a

pretty key difference between the two lenses

essentially the kit lens is relatively slow so compared to one of the prime

lenses here it's going to take more time to capture a given amount of light and

we'll see if that is a problem when we try to use it later on okay other things

to know well the main thing is that the kit lens is from a series called the EF-S

range now I'm not a lens expert you can probably gather that but one of the key

differences between that range of lenses and the other lenses that I've been

showing here today relates to the size of the lens when it's mounted on the

body of the camera so if you look hopefully you can see that the lens the

kit lens here it is going to protrude further into the camera body than this

prime lens now why is that significant well it's only significant if you have a

filter that you put inside your Canon EOS so often I use a clip filter which

is a light pollution filter which actually clips inside the camera so

it's inside the body and then normally a lens like this will screw onto the body

no problem if you try to do it with with this

lens that extra distance will foul the filter and you can't actually engage the

bayonet on the front of the camera so basically the kit lens will not work

with clip filters so if you're somewhere where you have a lot light pollution and

you generally rely on a filter of that type that you've already got then maybe

that's a proble. Of course if you've got another kind of filter arrangement maybe

one that fits over the front of the lens with a step down ring then that's not

an issue but for me it is a limitation because I use the clip filter quite a

lot. So what sort of results have I got using this kit lens well I started off

with Orion because it's the middle of the winter and I know from

using the nifty 50 that it's a good sort of size a target to capture in the field

of view so on the left this is a single first second frame using the kit lens

where it's operating around about what we might call the normal and normal lens

focal length so 55 mil and this is a comparison between the kit lens and the

nifty 50 and I say looking at it at that scale it gives pretty good results

you've got the Orion Nebula here and got reasonably good rendition of the stars

if we zoom in a bit closer I've cropped the entire nebula from each of the

frames and this is where you start to see some of the issues so for the 55

millimeter setting on the kit lens the brightest stars start to show a little

bit of purple or blue fringing around them and generally they're not very well

defined if we do the same for Orion's belt we see again the blue fringes

chromatic aberration around the brightest stars which is a little bit

distracting and then if we go to the extreme we look in one of the corners of

the field this is Betelgeuse it's pretty distorted in the kit lens and you can

see quite a lot of the other stars in that region the frame have got quite a

bit of distortion

so from then I moved on to looking at Cassiopeia and pointing the camera much

closer to the zenith at this point and this gives you an idea of the field of

view so you can capture all of the W and quite a section over towards Perseus and

the double cluster and we're going to zoom in on a couple of sections of that

frame so firstly near to Cassiopeia this is Delta Cassiopeia on the right there

so here we can see from this cropped frame we've managed to capture three

deep sky objects clusters within Cassiopeia and it's I'd say reason we

were to find with the exception of the bright star in Cassiopeia the chromatic

aberration is not as noticeable on the fainter stars and if we move on to the

double cluster well if you consider that this is a zoomed in section of the frame

of a kit lens it may have cost you nothing then I think that's quite a

decent result for the Perseus double cluster if we're going to get critical

we look in the corners as we did before the Orion image and we can see quite a

lot of aberrations these are not the sort of nice round star images that

you'd hope to see in your perfect camera lens so there you go

pays your money who takes your choice or maybe you don't pay any extra money but

it's not going to work so well at the corners of the frame and then moving on

to using the kit lens at its widest setting so this being at 18 millimetres

running at F 3.5 so it's a big field of view as you might expect you can capture

or eager Taurus and over here we can see I think pretty good rendition a nice

wide angle view of this part of the sky and then looking a bit closer onto the

Seven Sisters it I think records reasonably well we don't see such

noticeable chromatic aberration here at the 18 millimeter setting I think

that's quite a pleasing crop from the frame and then looking at the kit lens

18 millimeter setting looking at the corners the aberrations are still

present to some extent but not in any way as pronounced as when you're using

the lens at 55 millimetres so overall some good results

amongst the bad. So conclusions, kit lens for me if you've already got one of

these in your cupboard in your camera box or in your box of stuff that

you hardly ever use I'd say give it a try I wouldn't go out and buy it

specifically if you're looking to get an extra lens probably there's better homes

for your money but if you've got it already plug it in and give it a try for

me it's worked better its widest angle setting with a focal length of 18

millimeters and I think you can get some quite nice views at that setting

having said that 55 millimetres especially if you cock a bit of the

frame it can be okay to that made difficult using this lens I'd say is

because it is quite a slow focal ratio lens quite hard to focus so you've got

the combination of it being quite slow so if you're using live view which is

what I recommend it's quite hard to see any stars unless the the lens is quite

close to to the right focus point and when you found them the actual

adjustment of the focus ring is really fine and once you've got it right if you

move the camera around too much your nudge it and you'll lose focus so I'd

say that the focus itself is a bit fiddly but having said that the Nifty

Fifty which is a fantastic lens in my opinion great value for money is also a

bit fiddly and that is why you can see this fine piece of paint on the side of

it here to allow me to find the focus easily and even then it's a bit fiddly

so kit lens is the same don't expect it to be a 10 second setup you'll have to

play around with it focus it but if you do that and use it

maybe at the 18 millimeter setting I'd say you can get some good shots. Okay I

hope it's been useful thanks for watching and please subscribe to Jenham's Astro

bye for now.