The bad: This shot pretty much illuminates most of the faults of Canon's 24 mm ƒ/1.4L MK II USM, I'm afraid. The ones that can't be corrected, that is. There's significant vignetting (which I compensated somewhat for), there's horrific coma anywhere even near all four corners, and there's a good bit of chromatic aberration, some of which has been corrected, poorly, by Lightroom 4's tool for this. There's some circular distortion too, but you can't really tell in this shot.

The good: Contrast was good, color was good, light sensitivity at ƒ/1.4 is very good, the lens AF locked right away on a star and was pretty close to critical, though not perfect (I think this is good, compared to most.) I flip to MF right away, go to 10x, and fine tune the MF in the center, then shoot with that for a while, works great, truly critical focus achieved in just seconds, can't ask for much more than that. In daylight, color accuracy is high, as is contrast.

The lens really comes into its own in well lit situations, sort of a shame for an ƒ/1.4 lens. But we have to be realistic: The reason they make an ƒ/1.4 at all is for those people who like to blur the living bejabber out of backgrounds, not really so us astro types can suck in mag 11 stars, lol.

Although, hey, Canon, I'd really, really, really be interested in a wide, fast lens that didn't make me suffer with all these artifacts. Just sayin.

#astro

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