“Has anyone had tried this lens for astrophotography? Any successes?”
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If you are going to put it on a tracking tripod and are looking to catch one of the easier nebulae it can work, but its not a very fast lens for night time. Brighter celestial objects such as the Moon (always a favorite and easy to capture with this lens), Orion or Venus (when Close to earth) generally work pretty well with this lens. I have tried capturing Saturn and Jupiter with this lens and YES you can see them, but they are not very clear but you can make out Saturn and see the ring and you can faintly see the weather lines on jupiter. However, you really want this on a Equatorial mount for these type of pictures or any long exposures. I personally use the RF 100-500mm F/4.5-7.1 lens for the astro stuff (closer items) or Hyper Star and an Edge HD telescope for the other deeper/farther stuff. I found personally the best use for this lens for Astrophotography is the Moon. If you are using it with a Extender such as the RF1.4x or RF2x the moon is bright enough and with an iso range bump it allows you to capture some gorgeous shots of the moon, Probably of Orion Nebulae as well. The moon photo attached was done using the RF800mm F/11 Lens with a RF2x Extender If you run an extender on this and crank up the ISO you can get some pretty good long exposures (but at the cost of image noise) however, some (if not most) of that can be cleaned up in Post. Overall its a capable lens best used for Daytime use but it does have it's limited night time uses too. Hope this helps
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.Only shot the moon, which it does real well, since a relatively fast shutter can be used. I did a few quick shots of Saturn and Jupiter, but they are quite small in frame. To use on darker objects, the camera will have to track the subject. I've used 900mm f/9 refractor on deep space objects with good results. But, not this lens yet.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.It would be ok to take pictures of the moon, but you won't use it for something like the milky way. Astrophotography is typically done with a wider angle lens (35mm or less) and something like a 1.4 or 2.8 max aperture would be better. You might pull off other large celestial objects, Venus when it was closer, but even 800mm isn't going to fill the frame so you'll need to crop quite a bit in post. This isn't going to be like shooting through a telescope if that's what you're after.
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