What is the best camera lens for astrophotography?

[jeena1]

Hi...

I want to buy a camera kit and use it for astrophotography. My budget is around $1,000 Australian dollars for the actual camera body.

What are the best cameras, lenses and tripods you would recommend for astrophotography without using a telescope?

First I would like to start with planets, and then try nebulae.

And also, are there any specific brands that are best for this, and why?

Thanks for any advice :)

[RickJ]

Most of us here seem to use astro CCD's rather than DSLR cameras. You might want to post this question to the Cloudy Nights DSLR forum. See bottom for links.

Nearly all the DSLR images I have seen that can rival CCDs for deep sky imaging of the brighter objects (without cooling they just can't handle the really faint stuff but are improving rapidly) use various Canon cameras. But for emission nebula with any brand you will need to remove the IR filter or replace it as the ones that come with DSLR camera block most hydrogen alpha light, the main emission of such nebula. This causes them to come out green rather than pink. But since the human eye also sees very little hydrogen alpha light this color is what the eye would see. Just not what the camera sees. Also without much response at the primary emission frequency (within our eye's passband at least) exposure times will be much longer.

For planetary work the best imagers use a high quality USB 2 web cam. These can take a thousand images a minute allowing the best to be stacked with a program such as Registar. You can't begin to do this with anything but a web cam. With a DSLR or CCD you are the mercy of seeing and have to hope you trip the shutter at just the right instant when seeing is perfect. With the web cam and good software this luck element is eliminated.

See Mike Salway (Iceman) posts for what a web cam does for planetary images. Check this forum for his posts. He also uses a Canon for some deep sky imaging, both with the original filter and without it (two cameras). For a review of a web cam and some great planetary images see:
http://www.mikesalway.com.au/2009/02/18/review-of-the-dmk41af02-with-high-resolution-images

As for lenses I've seen some rather good kit lens images but never paid attention to what they were. Look through the Cloudy Nights DSLR forum and you'll see a lot of great images, many with kit lenses.

Cloudy Nights forum home page:
http://www.cloudynights.com/ubbthreads/index.php?Cat=0

DSLR forum:
http://www.cloudynights.com/ubbthreads/postlist.php/Cat/0/Board/DSLR

Rick