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M31 - The Sigma 105mm F2.8 Macro F-mount on a Nikon Z6


Cobberwebb

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I purchased this lens second hand as I couldn't afford the new Nikon 105mm macro. Stopped it down to F4, stuck it on the star adventurer, and pointed it at M31. Not bad at all.
60-70 lights and about 50 vignette frames
1 minute exposure for each light
ISO 3200

Stacked in Sequator , background removal in SiriL, a bit of PS for stretching, then I tried Topaz DeNoise AI (since it works really well on my non-astro shots). Came out a treat.
Maybe a little saturated for some, but I love it :)

M31 Z6.jpg

Edited by Cobberwebb
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  • Cobberwebb changed the title to M31 - The Sigma 105mm F2.8 Macro F-mount on a Nikon Z6
  • 5 months later...

I did just buy this lens (used example) for my star adventurer. I did look up sigma 105mm on Astrobin, but I see they all use the 105mm f/1.8 ART, which is 3X the price! 

Still should yield better results than my Canon 75-300mm, but this is miles off the Rokinon/Samyang 135mm. Might see if I can return it and put the ££ towards that, a lot of the stars seem quite misshapen around the edges. Have you tried star tools and the star shrink? Great picture for the exposure time though, just a lot more field curvature than I had expected.

Edited by Shaun_Astro
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Good result. I don't use mine for astro but I think it's a mind-bendingly good lens, especially at the price.

Camera lens images are going to be star-dominated because of the small aperture producing large stars. I think that if you ran your image through Star Xterminator to remove the stars,  you'd be able to stretch the galaxy harder then replace the stars at a softer stretch to keep them down.  Lovely star colour in yours. (Starnet++ is an alternative to StarXt.)

Olly

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I actually sold my sigma 105 f2.8 macro last year after I got rid of my DSLR. It did handle quite well but star shapes weren't exactly ideal at the corners, and that was on an aps-c sensor, and the lens is supposed to be full frame suitable.

It was very good at normal photographs though, I definitely got my money's worth from it.

 

This capture is very nice too, beats a lot of stuff I captured with mine for sure. Shows what happens when it ends up in the hands of someone capable ha.

 

On 02/02/2023 at 22:22, Shaun_Astro said:

I did just buy this lens (used example) for my star adventurer. I did look up sigma 105mm on Astrobin, but I see they all use the 105mm f/1.8 ART, which is 3X the price! 

Still should yield better results than my Canon 75-300mm, but this is miles off the Rokinon/Samyang 135mm. Might see if I can return it and put the ££ towards that, a lot of the stars seem quite misshapen around the edges. Have you tried star tools and the star shrink? Great picture for the exposure time though, just a lot more field curvature than I had expected.

I looked at the art lenses, as well as the Zeiss lineup when looking for imaging lenses in the 1-200mm focal length range... Sadly while all very well corrected for distortion and chroma, ALL of the fast lenses have insanely high vignetting (most of the f1.4 lenses are only 30% illuminated at best by the corner of a full frame sensor) and the MTF curve is very dodgy. Plus they cost as much as or more than a redcat51 or askar ACL 200. 

I'm sure I'd adore those lenses for regular photography, but my mind does so much more pixel peeping with astro!

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Yes I've been reading it punches above it's price range non-astro wise.

Here's my first image with it. Not sure whether the Askar 30mm f4.5 would have been a better shout, quite bad stars in the edges, although reviews did congratulate it on it's flat field, and f4-5 gets rid of vignetting completely (as do flats with flat darks).

 

 

 

 

StackedStars_STE.png

Edited by Shaun_Astro
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