u/ThatAstroGuyNZ

Wasserwerk am Roten Tor (The waterworks at the red gate)

Pictured is what is considered the oldest surviving water tower in Central Europe and its associated aqueduct located in Augsburg, Germany

The foreground is made up of a series of photos taken during mid blue hour on the Viltrox 35mm f1.8 evo II and my Sony a7 iii

This image includes sky data edited licensed under CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons. The original creator is s58y and you can find the full panorama here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:154-panel\\\_Widefield\\\_Milky\\\_Way\\\_Panorama.jpg (this is what I wrote)

Unfortunately due to the droughts Europe has been facing the river was not as full as I had liked it to be but on the other hand it did reveal lots of really nice texture in the exposed rocks in the foreground leading up to the manmade falls.

This image includes sky data edited licensed under CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons. The original creator is s58y and you can find the full panorama here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:154-panel\\\_Widefield\\\_Milky\\\_Way\\\_Panorama.jpg (this is what I wrote)

There’s something strange about standing on worn cobblestone streets, tracing my hands along stonework that was already aging when the first major cities in my country were being constructed, coming from a place in the world where architecture that we consider old but in comparison to Bavaria would still be considered young. Here are some of the streets and buildings still standing the test of time that I considered photo worthy.
A quick note on the skies in these images, while they likely don’t represent what you’d see overhead at these locations given light pollution, I made sure the skies were still placed where they would have been on the dates I took the foregrounds, so these will lean more into fantasy Astro rather than clinical realism.
To note as well, I wasn’t lucky enough to get a single clear moonless night on my trip and as such I had to look for other ways to make my visions with these foregrounds come true.

This image includes sky data edited licensed under CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons. The original creator is s58y and you can find the full panorama here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:154-panel\_Widefield\_Milky\_Way\_Panorama.jpg (this is what I wrote)

Over the Matariki long weekend I decided to venture into the Mavora lakes conservation area in Fiordland New Zealand as it was the first weekend in weeks that I had pristine skies.

What you see before you is a combination of blue hour foreground images blended with skies taken on a modded HA camera and star tracker.

The foregrounds were taken on my Sony a7 iii with a mix of the Tamron 28-200mm, Viltrox 16mm and Viltrox 35mm

The skies were taken on my HA modded Sony a6300 using a move shoot move nomad tracker, Tamron 28-200mm lens and Viltrox 16mm lens.

Managed to get some clear skies right before the moon rose two nights ago and figured I’d test out the new 35mm evo II.

The first image is an 18 shot stack with each image made up of 15s, iso 1600 and wide open at f1.8, stacked and edited in siril. The second image is a 36 shot panorama made up of photos at the same settings and the third photo is a 6 image panorama again at the same settings.

As I mainly do Astro this will mainly be focused on an Astro review but will cover some daytime testing as well. The first thing I notice is how much light this little lens lets in, I could physically see, in real time, the milky ways nebula on screen before I took a photo, never in my life have I experience that and it was pretty wicked to see.

Overall as an Astro lens it performs really well, it sits in a good spot of just wide enough to cover a good portion of the sky, but close enough in to not lose detail.

The images felt sharp even towards the edges, there were no artefacts, no coma, no fringing and over all the lens was light and felt easy to use. The aperture ring is incredibly smooth but not so smooth you’ll accidentally move it, the focus ring is the same. The one gripe I do have that may be changed in firmware updates is that when focusing to infinity you have to hit the absolute perfect sweet spot which is somewhere in the middle of the infinity range on the in camera focus range for my Sony a7 iii. I found to make sure the focus was correct I had to zoom to 11x digitally using my in camera focus magnifier to make sure the stars were sharp while focusing.

During the day the lens worked like an absolute dream, it’s autofocus was fast, and most importantly extremely quiet, there was some minor focus breathing but it was negligible, I found even at f4 images were incredibly sharp and presented some really nice colours. I really didn’t have any issues using it during the day and thought it performed extremely well.

The lens itself is a really great mix of lightweight and good build quality that sits right in between the air series lenses and the pro series lenses, in my honest opinion it is a go to prime lens for photographers of all walks of life.