 Today's video is sponsored by Squarespace. I love weird lenses, and so this video is going to be all about two weird lenses in my collection and whether they're suitable for astrophotography. This is the longest lens in my collection. It's the Canon RF 800mm f11, and this is the shortest lens I own. It's the FunLeader 18mm f8 cap lens. I didn't buy either of these lenses with DeepSky Astrophotography in mind, but I've been really curious how they'll do under the stars. So tonight's the night. I'm going to be testing these with my old trusty Orion Atlas mount, and we will see what kind of results I can get shooting the Lagoon Nebula in the constellation Sagittarius. Looking at the framing here with 18mm on full frame, my Canon RA, it's going to be a classic Milky Way shot. And at 800mm, we're just going to barely be able to get in the Lagoon and the Trifid in the same frame. With these being slow lenses at fixed f8 for this one and fixed f11 for this one, we're going to have to let the photons collect for several minutes in each sub-exposure. So if you've watched my channel before, you may have seen me do 30-second, 60-second sub-exposures, but that's when I'm using fast lenses, like at f2, f2.8. With these slow lenses, we're going to have to do three, four, maybe five minutes to get adequate exposure. And at 800mm focal length with long exposures, even the beefy Orion Atlas mount is not going to be able to track the night sky accurately enough to get round stars at five minutes with an 800mm lens. So I'm going to pair it with a William Optics guide scope and a ZWO guide camera. And with these devices, we can use a software called PhD2 to record the movement of the stars every couple seconds. And if they move even just a fraction of a pixel, the software can send a correction back to the mount so that it tracks the night sky more accurately. We won't need that level of accuracy for this short lens because with such a wide angle lens, those small inaccuracies in the tracking won't show up in the photos. What we will need to do with the 18mm lens is put the camera right on the front end of the dovetail so that we don't get the dovetail in the shot at all. So before we jump into the photos, let's first take a look at the design of these lenses and also where they shine outside of the astrophotography context. First off, both of these are RF lenses, RF mount, but FunLeader does make this lens for all of the mirrorless camera systems, including Sony, Nikon, all that. The Canon 800RF is only for Canon R mirrorless cameras. FunLeader literally calls this their cap lens, all one word, with the idea that it could replace the body cap on your camera, which is exactly how I've been using it. But I've also been using it as a fun walking around lens that allows me to basically get cell phone quality photos, but with full manual control of shutter speed, ISO, picture profile, all the things that I can do with my Canon. I also find it much more comfortable taking photos with a camera with a grip versus doing it with my phone. So I use this when I'm just walking around in place of my cell phone, basically. So here's Maggie at Walden Pond at the Thoreau Museum. And so for bright daytime shots, I think this is really fun. Not too much to say about the design, because there's not much to say about it. There's no moving parts. It's a fixed aperture, F8, fixed focus, and anything about three feet away to infinity. So it can't do any kind of close focusing. But that won't be a problem for astrophotography, of course. The lens is only, I can get it off here, 15 millimeters thick. It weighs about 80 grams or three ounces. And I've been having a lot of fun with it, even though it's not the best quality lens necessarily. For the Canon 800 millimeter RF-F11 lens, I bought this for daytime nature photography. I was especially interested in the ability to use this handheld with the image stabilization on, like this. And you might be thinking, that's crazy with such a massive lens. But the thing is, by making it a fixed F11, Canon was actually able to make this very light weight considering the length. This is just about two and a half pounds. And so I find it pretty comfortable for going around handheld. And in my limited tests that I've had so far, I just got this pretty recently, you can see it here handheld on an adolescent goose that I think came out pretty well. I love the expression with the cocked head and those little water droplets there on his head. And then here's a test of a cool cloud formation. This was also done handheld. And if you follow me on Instagram, I'm planning on bringing this lens on a big trip this next week. So you'll see more results like these ones in my Instagram stories if you're interested. This lens also works great on the moon, as you might expect. If you follow my YouTube channel, you've probably seen me recently doing the total lunar eclipse on a star adventurer with this lens and this camera. And I thought it did really great for that. The moon looked pretty sharp. There wasn't much fringing. In terms of physical characteristics and its retracted state like this, it's 282 millimeters. You can have it like this for storage. When you actually want to use the lens though, you do have to extend it out like this. And that makes it 352 millimeters or over 13 inches long. It has three sides on the side of the barrel here. One is for stabilization. One is for autofocus or manual focus. And one is for focusing distance, which is really just an autofocusing thing. For astrophotography, we want it on manual focus and we want the stabilizer off because I have been in cases where I forgot to turn the stabilizer off and get weird star shapes because it's trying to do little micro movements to stabilize. Okay, before I forget, today's video is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for designing and hosting a beautiful website or portfolio. And I've been meaning to revamp my personal website, nicocarver.com. For many years, I know that I'm a procrastinator. But when this opportunity from Squarespace came up, I jumped on it. Because I really did want to use their professional templates to put together something quickly. And I chose one that I thought looked good. I was able to just drop in my photos into different categories. I got to pick what those categories were, of course, and I can add as many as I want. You can see, actually, I just made some new categories today for these shots that I'm taking with the RF800. So I added a new birds category and a clouds category because I love taking photos of interesting clouds, actually. And so everything when I was designing this is what you see is what you get editor, which I really love. It's truly a real-time preview. You can see what you're doing. There's no coding necessary. And I think Squarespace would be a great choice if you want to have a nice professional-looking spot to share your astrophotography with your own domain name. And so if you're interested, head over to Squarespace.com slash Nebula Photos. You can start your free trial. And if you like it, you can get 10% off your first purchase of a domain or hosting with the code Nebula Photos. So now let's turn to the main event with the Fun Leader 18-millimeter cap lens. Here is a single exposure at four minutes. And you can see it has pretty extreme vignetting and plenty of distortion away from center. And that becomes even worse when you stack. Here's a stack of 12 with the foreground cutoff. And I maybe could have tried to do skyflats, but I didn't end up doing that. So I ended up just cropping down a bit, and then I put in one of the foregrounds back in to make the final shot. That's my friend, Haytham, with the red light there. And I think it adds a little bit of interest to have a foreground whenever you're doing Milky Way. So to evaluate this, we still have both vignetting. We have color shifting away from the center. In the very center, though, the stars and colors and details actually look fine to me. The Fun Leader was about what I expected, maybe a little better in the center. On the other hand, with the RF800, I was actually pretty surprised by how good it looked. This is a single five-minute exposure, and when I saw this for the first time, I was like, wow, for a sub-$1,800-millimeter lens, that did pretty well. At least for nice, bright, deep sky objects like the Lagoon and Trifid here, the F11 was in a huge impediment for getting a nice shot. And the star field is what's really pretty nice. There's not much distortion, not much chromatic aberration. Even in the corners, the stars look pretty sharp. Here's a stack of 12. And with the stack, you do see a little bit of aberrations on the stars. There's this hourglass distortion on the bright stars. And that's actually a pretty common distortion that afflicts even very well regarded lenses like the Rokinon 135 wide open. I've even seen it on Takahashi scopes. I can't remember if it has a more scientific name, but I just call it hourglass distortion. It basically just looks like two little triangles were cut out of the star. And other than that, this is pretty noisy for an hour of integration compared to what I'm used to, because I use fast lenses usually. This is for a slow focal ratio. But that's to be expected. You could just shoot more and be closer in on your objects with more detail. So I didn't buy these lenses for deep sky astrophotography. And again, I don't think they are particularly good value necessarily for deep sky alone, given that they're slow fixed aperture. But I'm mostly thinking of them as daytime lenses. And then the RF 800 was also pretty good for lunar. But after seeing these results, I think that I might be trying the RF 800 on some other deep sky objects, because it actually renders Starfields pretty shockingly well. And it gives me that reach of 800 millimeters and a pretty small lightweight package. And so I think I'm going to try this on my StarVenture GTI next, because I think that might be under or I know it'll be under the payload limit, because it's really light. And my GTI can guide just about as well as my Orion Atlas. So let me know in the comments, what deep sky object you think I should try this combo out on next? I'm thinking maybe a bright galaxy, like one of the Messier galaxy's might be a good bet. So anyways, my final thoughts are the fun leader cap lens, fun daytime lens, but won't be coming out again at night, at least for me. The RF 800, on the other hand, is a lot more versatile than I thought it would be. It's great for wildlife, lunar and actually decent on Starfields and bright deep sky objects. Well, till next time, this has been Nico Carver and Nebula Photos. Clear skies.