M42 lenses for astrophotography Vintage lenses with an M42 screw mount can be a great choice for wide angle astrophotography. Often available on internet marketplaces and second-hand camera stores for reasonable prices, they can be mounted to modern DSLR bodies by means of a small adaptor. Some of these optics easily outperform modern zoom lenses, like our trusted Yashinon and Zeiss Sonnar. But not all M42 lenses are well suited for astrophotography. A lot of them show considerable chromatic abberation and coma, especially in the field corners. To find out which M42 lenses perform well in astrophotography, we acquired and tested a lot of these optics over the years. The table below gives our result: a shortlist of M42 lenses very well suited for deep sky imaging with an APS-C sized DSLR chip. The optimum f-stop for really crisp shots is given too: Peleng 2.8/8 @f/5.6 Zenitar 2.8/16 @f/5.6 Mir-1 2.8/37 @f/5.6 Yashinon 1.7/50 @f/4 Jupiter-9 2.0/85 @f/4 Sonnar 3.5/135 @f/4 Tair-3 4.5/300 @f/6.7