Can I use an ordinary camera lens for astrophotography?

Yes, and it is the cheapest genuine start. Wide lenses forgive rough polar alignment and frame objects no telescope can; the usual difficulty is that fast lenses show aberrated stars at the corners wide open.

A camera, a lens and one driven axis is where most people’s first real astrophotograph comes from.

Why wide is easier

Tracking error scales with focal length. A rough polar alignment that ruins a frame at 400 mm is invisible at 24 mm, so a wide lens turns a difficult evening into a straightforward one.

Stop down

Star images are the hardest thing a lens renders. Coma, astigmatism and lateral colour all show at the corners wide open, and one or two stops usually transforms them. Take more frames rather than fewer at full aperture.

Focus on a star, not on the mark

Infinity marks are not reliable and focus shifts as the lens cools. Use live view at maximum zoom on a bright star, and check again partway through the session.

What to expect

Round stars, a recognisable Milky Way, and colour that the eye never sees. It is also where the whole calibration and stacking workflow is learned, on the easiest possible subject.

If this page and the manufacturer’s own documentation disagree, follow the documentation. Every aperture, focal length, payload rating, field, eye relief, transmission figure and thread size on this page comes from the maker’s own published figures, with the unit as printed and the source named. None of it is measured here, and no figure is converted into another convention, because a converted number is a different number. And for any sensor: a pixel size means nothing without the focal length it sits behind. The same camera is well matched to one telescope and wasteful on another, and a frame rate quoted for the full sensor is not the rate achieved over the small region a planet occupies. This page reports the maker’s figures as published and computes no sampling from them.