Vintage lens

[Artur Torretti]

Helli eveyone.

Despite reading the forum a lot in the last weeks, it's the first time I post.

I'm a beginner in astronomy/astrofography and after collecting some advices here i  kind have a plan about the setup I want in the future. But for now, i want to buy some  lenses to use with my canon 700d and get more astrofography feeling. With that said, I would like to know which lenses you guys  advise me. I was thinking about a Canon 50mm 1.8 that second hand costs about 90 euros, but then I saw the vintage lenses in Ebay, which are more affordable ,so i was thinking about a 135mm or even 200mm, or maybe one of these and also a 50mm vintage. Oh, as they are m42 mount, will all of them work with a m42 to eos adaptor i might have problem to focus with different lenght ?

Thanks in advance

[powerlord]

hi. ive a bunch of vintage lenses for my 6d ive got off ebay. all have been fine reaching infinity with m42 to eos adapter.

some have been sharp with stars, some are terrible. its a case kf just getti g some cheap and trying. takamurs are held up as good (my 200 is).  but i have others which work great for daylight photos, but terrible star shapes.

stu

[Rustang]

You can pick them up cheap so worth ago, I paid as little as £25 for one. I've tried the 28mm, 50mm, 135mm and 200mm Pentax Takumars but you have to stop them down and they suit crop sensors better in my experience so you should be ok with the 700d. You get what you pay for though but the're not to bad. 

Edited January 17, 2022 by Rustang

[Artur Torretti]

I will definitely give it a try.  The takumar ones and carl zeiss seens to be the most expensive ones ( and probably good), all the "ok" prices has some kinde of flaw like fungus or haze. Maybe iam not looking properly hehe. Also , there are other brands like tokina, pentacon and the ussr jupiter that are not that expensive, but looks decent!

[Rustang]

If its cheap enough, give it a whirl, they will be better if coated though (SMC on the Pentax Takumars stands for Super Multi Coated) and an apature of f2.8 - f1.8 to start with because I would imagine you will still need to stop down to F4 - f5. 6 with any cheap lens. Buy well enough second hand and you should make your money back anyway so it won't matter if its a slightly more expensive lens. 

Edited January 18, 2022 by Rustang

[powerlord]

I've just spent night shooting with a cheap 28mm vintage on an asi533.

Even stopped down its not one for star peepers but I think it should still be decent, watch imaging dso forum for results today or tomorrow.

[Rustang]

They won't win any awards but these were all taken with old lenses, mostly Pentax Takumar's and a Hoya 28mm. It should give you a rough idea of what to expect. Filters will really help ( i.e light pulltion) a couple of these were taken with the L - enhance. You will also certainly need good flat frames as these images were a nightmare to process because I didnt!

Edited January 18, 2022 by Rustang

[alacant]

Hi

We regularly use the Takumar 55, Zeiss mc-s 135, Takumar 200 and the Tair 3, the latter, a 70mm f4.5 triplet, producing near telescope quality. All are available around €100. They were designed to cover full frame, so there is an excellent flat field on a 700d.

You'll need an eos to m42 adapter. We'd recommend an adjustable one and either cut the auto pin in the lens or file a notch in the flange on the adapter.

Cheers and HTH

 

 

Edited January 18, 2022 by alacant

[Artur Torretti]

Thank you guys for the answer so far. 

@Rustang @alacant stunning images , congratulations. Its way more than I expected, of course there are more factors than the lens, but yeah its amazing. 

I will keep looking for some good deal on the ones you guys mentioned. Thanks again 

 

Cheers

 

[powerlord]

Posting this here, as it's too bad for anywhere else!

This is the results from my 18 quid 28mm vintage job - stopped down 3 stops.

don't look at the stars if you have a nervous disposition.

However, I attach the unedited stack underneath.. so you can see how bad it was before affinity photo work.

Needless to say, that lens will not be used again for astro ! (it's great for video work, etc with the 6d though).

Also, note that I neglected the need for a lens shield to shield from moon reflections!!

 

 

the raw stacked shot:

 

[Rustang]

13 hours ago, powerlord said:

Posting this here, as it's too bad for anywhere else!

This is the results from my 18 quid 28mm vintage job - stopped down 3 stops.

don't look at the stars if you have a nervous disposition.

However, I attach the unedited stack underneath.. so you can see how bad it was before affinity photo work.

Needless to say, that lens will not be used again for astro ! (it's great for video work, etc with the 6d though).

Also, note that I neglected the need for a lens shield to shield from moon reflections!!

 

 

the raw stacked shot:

 

Its definitely trial and error with these old lens but you can get them to work ok but also be realistic with what the results are going to be like. I just really need to find away to get flats to work as so far they just dont! 

Edited January 19, 2022 by Rustang

[powerlord]

oh ? i used flats above ok. No different from other otas. waht issues are you having ?

[Rustang]

4 hours ago, powerlord said:

oh ? i used flats above ok. No different from other otas. waht issues are you having ?

I know how to take them they just never appear to work! Had some good advice again recently in regards to flats, tried it, still didn't work. I need to have a play around, see what I can do, maybe it's the Led panel. 

[Ratlet]

So a while back I bought a Takumar 200mm/F4 lens to get the ball rolling with some astrophotography.  Took me a while to cobble together the bits and pieces and have clear skies, but last night it was pretty clear and a it up in the upstairs room and pointed it what I thought was Vega (turned out I missed the mark completely and nailed NGC 6606 bang on initially (thank you plate solving).

Loads of fun.  Got to play with the intervalometer, try and find my target manually, muck about with exposure and focus.  Even got a quick test with the bahtinov mask (looks to be reasonably in focus, but it is hard on the infinity stop so might need to adjust as I'm not quite convinced it was bang).

I wouldn't call it a real run it was purely to assess how bad the chromatic aberration was.  Exposure was limited to 1.3sec per sub as it was unguided for a whopping total of 27.3 seconds of data untracked.  All in all I'm impressed and it was lots of fun!  Lens was stepped down to F5.6 as apparently this is where the chromatic aberration is minimised.  ISO 6400 because I forgot to dial it back after checking focus.

There is some weird diagonal banding which is probably because I did no flat, darks or bias images (one thing at a time)...

In the below image you can see the final processed data from Siril, top left (from the NGC 6606 session) and top right (from the Vega session) are a couple of (I think) Lyriads since the direction looks correct and I can't see any satellites about that time on Stellarium.  Middle image is a crop of the bahtinov mask focus (Wife made it for me on her cricut from thick card).

All in all, I'm delighted.  A very sensible use of £45 for the lens!  If it is clear tonight I might try again for more data

Edited April 19, 2022 by Ratlet
include the iso and correct spelling

[Ratlet]

So.  I finally got the SMC Takumar 200mm out for a proper session.  Below is 2 hours of stacked 90s subs, stepped down to F5.6.  I used an Altair Astro 533c Hypercam for this and the shots were guided.

These were taken with the moon about 90-95% full.

Stack is photometric colour calibrated and auto-stretched in siril.

I think it turned out pretty well.  The stars are (to my eyes) very tight with a slight hint of blue fringing.  Focusing was manual (no mask) as per @alacant recommendations.

For a £40 lens I'm absolutely delighted.

Edited October 8, 2022 by Ratlet
Added focus detail

[powerlord]

very nice. and you did well to get a takamur for 40 quid.

[Ratlet]

The one downside of buying vintage lenses.  An apparently 'lenses look good' tair 3 from eBay.  Should probably have asked for a refund, but I quite fancy having a go at servicing a lens so will give it a shot.  Was only £50 so not a major loss.  Provided it's not etched to coating...

Will give it a clean once my air blower arrives from Amazon.  There is a good tear down video on YouTube that walks you through the process.

 

[Elp]

Looks a bit like fungus too. You'll have to take the lens out and submerge it in hydrogen peroxide or something. I used white vinegar last time as it's all I had at hand, it has its uses for general cleaning and disinfecting.

The last lens I bought was caked in sticky residue due to the rubber and plastic breaking down (again seller didn't even mention this), but WD40 contact cleaner did the job even though I had wiped off all the barrel markings by that point.

[Ratlet]

Aye, it almost certainly does have fungus.  I've given as much as I can of the body a wipe down with iso propyl and will give it a blast with a UV light to help kill any spores.

I'm planning pretty much as you describe for the lens.  I'll soak it to make sure the spores are dead then give it a good clean.

[Ratlet]

Got the lens cleaned up.  Came up alright (bit of surface dust on the element).  There is some definite damage to the coatings although it is minimal.  Test with an artificial star at least shows no chromatic aberation though no idea how it'll look in an actual image.  I'll have to look at some tube rings from FLO to mount it to something as the mounting point is pretty shallow.

Edited October 26, 2022 by Ratlet

[wulfrun]

Good result, looks rather better than before! I've cleaned a few (photographic) lenses over the years with similar effect. The coatings got etched by fungus to some degree. Good news is it didn't seem to affect the image quality so hopefully you'll be fine.

[John Wick]

Sorry to jump on the thread, but have been considering something like this myself in 500mm,  looking on ebay I see such a variety of prices. For instance why is this so cheap? Would it work for say lunar photos or andromeda or similar. 

 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/165500634226?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=sNyqHN0JT6O&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=xekd7DxnSz6&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

Edited October 27, 2022 by John Wick

[Ratlet]

Generally these mirror lenses arent brilliant and have softer focus than a conventional lens.  Not to say it won't work, it just might not be great.

You'll be best of using an FOV calculator such as this or stellarium.  Just make sure you use imaging mode and select your camera and just the focal length.

Hyugens Optics on YouTube did a good video today on mirror lenses.

https://youtu.be/x2BiM7BGQMU

Personally I wouldn't for the money.  Rather I didn't.  You can fit loads of DSO in 200-300mm focal length and pick up a super takumar or tair 3 for about half the cost of the mirror lens.

Not to say I'm not going for some unknown entities.  I've got a couple 135mm lenses I'm waiting on clear skies to test out.  But those cost £10 a pop.

 

[John Wick]

1 hour ago, Ratlet said:

Generally these mirror lenses arent brilliant and have softer focus than a conventional lens.  Not to say it won't work, it just might not be great.

You'll be best of using an FOV calculator such as this or stellarium.  Just make sure you use imaging mode and select your camera and just the focal length.

Hyugens Optics on YouTube did a good video today on mirror lenses.

https://youtu.be/x2BiM7BGQMU

Personally I wouldn't for the money.  Rather I didn't.  You can fit loads of DSO in 200-300mm focal length and pick up a super takumar or tair 3 for about half the cost of the mirror lens.

Not to say I'm not going for some unknown entities.  I've got a couple 135mm lenses I'm waiting on clear skies to test out.  But those cost £10 a pop.

 

 

 

I already possess a 135mm Samyang F2. Was after something larger in regards to the focal length,around 500mm.Happy to hear recommendations 

[Elp]

I think DSLR glass at such focal lengths gets very expensive and much slower if you want good optics, the chromatic aberration will be quite bad. They're not really designed for AP. The longest one I have is a 70-300 apo but that even though it is an apo doesn't work for AP, it's excellent during the day however. The Takumar 200mm works okay and you can run it at f5.6 so it's a reasonable speed. You may be better off getting a short focal length refractor instead.